CORRESPONDENCE

Correspondence Futile Care and the Value of Life Wesley J. Smith gives a chilling preview of the practice of denying medical care to the elderly, disabled, and chronically ill ("The Deadly...

...Assuming the letter isn't spurious, it is none of your business and certainly none of mine...
...School success depends-in addition to normal intelligence-on respect for the teacher, a grasp of standard English, and behavior suited to the learning environment...
...30/Dec...
...By this logic, if intrinsic differences account for the disparate success of blacks in basketball, then by law, each starting five should have three whites and a Hispanic (and half of each team should be made up of women...
...The truth is, the ads had little, if any, impact on races where GOP gubernatorial or senatorial candidates connected with African-American voters with a credible message of inclusion...
...With the higher than expected black voter turnout, the Democratic party defied history and picked up five seats in the House, held the line in the Senate, and toppled Republican governors in Alabama and South Carolina...
...The national party leaders must come to grips with the perception that the party is hostile to the interests of African Americans or GOP may soon stand for "Going Out of Politics...
...DAVID C. STOLINSKY LOS ANGELES, CA POLLOCKS PROBLEMS David Gelernter's descriptions of Jackson Pollock's work illustrate a desire to impose meaning on a mode of painting that has no meaning and thereby raise it from the level of interesting decoration to the level of art ("Picturing Jackson Pollock," Nov...
...This recoil explains why conservatives have been able to make no gains in the last two congressional elections...
...A child's mind is like a sponge...
...Gelernter joins the likes of Clement Greenberg in mystifying modern art to the level of sociology, which is best defined as "the verbose and belabored attempt to define that which is already supremely obvious...
...While we cannot reach into every home and provide two parents who value educational achievement, provide books and read to their child, and teach respect for other people, we might try to see that differences in preschool life have a major impact on performance...
...For those of us who believe that physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia, and the denial of possibly helpful care are morally wrong and dangerous, this is good news...
...He also notes that such efforts will save little money, a fact demonstrated in a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine...
...College admissions, he argues, should be similarly color-blind, unless "there are intrinsic differences between the races...
...There are two kinds of conservatives: conservative ideologues, of which there are a small number, and temperamental conservatives, of which there are a great many...
...WALTER R. HEIL YERINGTON, NV A TRIBE APART The Scrapbook's mention of Laurence Tribe's Rodney Dangerfield treatment by the House Judiciary Committee caught my eye ("Laurence Tribe's Tantrum," Nov...
...Correspondence Futile Care and the Value of Life Wesley J. Smith gives a chilling preview of the practice of denying medical care to the elderly, disabled, and chronically ill ("The Deadly Ethics of 'Futile Care Theory'," Nov...
...Temperamental conservatives, whose forte is common sense, recoil from such a strange idea...
...JACK FROST COLORADO SPRINGS, CO THE GOP AND RACE Matt Labash is right about the Democratic Party's shameless race-baiting in the recent election, but he misses the larger point: Those tactics worked ("The New Race-Baiters," Nov...
...FAYE M. ANDERSON WASHINGTON, DC PREFERENCE FOR EDUCATION Dinesh D'Souza seems to recognize that until the importance of cultural differences in children's formative years is recognized, the same old expectations of improvement in education will be addressed by putting more money into methods that have failed ("A World Without Racial Preferences," Nov...
...John Engler each garnered 27 percent of the black vote...
...In Florida, Gov.-elect Jeb Bush, who wrote off black voters in 1994 and lost a close election, won with 14 percent of the black vote this time around...
...More important, the midterm election results have spooked the GOP and triggered turmoil in the national leadership...
...If savings are still insufficient, consent might be imputed for the demented, the confused, the aphasic, the disabled, the mentally ill, the homeless, and others whose "quality of life" is judged to be poor by physicians, HMOs, and bureaucrats...
...By contrast, African-American support for Republican congressional candidates fell to 11 percent from 18 percent in 1996...
...Such differences, D'Souza says, would constitute "the strongest possible argument in favor of affirmative action...
...Republican expectations in the last election were based on the issues they raised involving catching the president with his pants down...
...But why should this come as a surprise to anyone...
...Consider this: Texas Gov...
...There is no easy program to solve our educational woes, but if our citizenry refuses to look at the facts honestly, the hopeful expectations of millions of disadvantaged parents will not be fulfilled...
...The national GOP leaders' unwillingness to put their money where their rhetoric was belied the party's commitment to reaching out to African-American voters and allowed Democratic demagogues to demonize the GOP with impunity...
...The boy, sitting beside Capone, often thought to be the racketeer's son, is a stand-in...
...The cultural values of the home are baggage the child carries to school on the first day, and will inevitably define his in-school performance...
...It struck me as ironic in that it mirrored Ken Starr's treatment before the same committee...
...Can the conservative cause win favor by launching ad hominem attacks on good men and women of more liberal views...
...I noted that every Republican addressed "Judge" Starr, while every Democrat questioned "Mr...
...Pollock failed as an artist because he lacked not only the skill to represent reality but the courage to face it...
...DANIEL LOVE GLAZER CHICAGO, IL MODERN ADULTERY David Gelernter is right when he says "sometime soon, we will look at Clinton and it will come to us that we are looking in a mirror" ("Adultery, Then and Now," Nov...
...DAVID R. CARLIN NEWPORT, RI...
...He then criticizes the term "homophobia" as though it were a bad joke...
...That sage of sages, Pogo, told us this many years ago when he said "we have met the enemy and he is us...
...I don't think so...
...Harvey Gordon Kalamazoo, MI What an example of coincidental irony that David Gelernter's review of Jackson Pollock's retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art is separated by a mere two pages from a review of Tom Wolfe's book A Man in Full...
...It was Wolfe who ripped open the great gasbags of critical visual-art verbosity who had lifted painters such as Pollock, Rauschenberg, and Reinhardt out of obscurity...
...It absorbs everything in its environment, starting from birth...
...30/Dec...
...KEPA CHO OAKLAND, CA AL CAPONE'S PHOTO-OP In Christopher Caldwell's review of Harold Evans's The American Century, the caption to a famous picture reads: "Chicago Cubs' catcher Gabby Hartnett signs a baseball for Al Capone's son" ("Picturing Our Century," Nov...
...RICHARD R. WEST GENOA, NV NO CONSENT Harvey Mansfield believes that the election was about sex and elaborates on how the phrase "sex between consenting adults" was coined to legitimize homosexuality ("A Nation of Consenting Adults," Nov...
...It is time to stop glorifying a failure of artistic nerve with a failure of understanding and common sense...
...George W. Bush and Michigan Gov...
...The key question is not precisely how much money will be saved, but how human life is to be evaluated...
...I await with interest a report on Starr's e-mail...
...30/Dec...
...The successes of some GOP governors notwithstanding, the Grand Old Party has a national image problem which can only be addressed effectively from Washington...
...Gelernter fails because Pollock's personal experience is not represented in his paintings and is therefore not relevant to them...
...30/Dec...
...Ramsey, a decent person should ask why it was published...
...Only ideologues are able to talk themselves into a belief that un-conservative means can be used to bring about conservative ends...
...It should be noted that the Republicans did not spend a dime of their $37 million "Operation Breakout" media budget advertising on black radio or in black newspapers...
...DOROTHEA TAMBORSKI DAYTON, OH Dinesh D'Souza observes that no one objects to the racial imbalance in the National Basketball Association, because it is acknowledged that only merit governs the selection of NBA players...
...His caption for the same picture reads: "Al Capone attends a baseball game in Chicago, not long before his trial for income tax evasion commenced...
...There was a time when it was thought ill-mannered to read other people's mail...
...Once we accept that human life has no transcendent value, the battle is lost...
...Starr...
...This strategic blunder suggests arrogance, as well as ignorance of the political maxim that you can't beat something with nothing...
...In Laurence Bergreen's comprehensive biography, Capone, he debunks the popular myth behind this image...
...GERALD J. FOSTER EPHRATA, WA THE DEATH OF IDEOLOGUES May an old and incurable Democrat, one who is sympathetic to much of the cultural agenda of today's Republican conservatives, give William Kristol and David Tell a bit of gratuitous advice ("A Teetering Republican Majority," Nov...
...It is these kinds of diatribes that cause Republicans' woes...
...In a democratic polity the former can achieve little without support from the latter...
...SHALE SAN DIEGO, CA With regard to Laurence Tribe's letter to Mr...
...J.H...
...But those who favor these practices may read the study differently: If insufficient money is saved by patients or families volunteering to end patients' lives, then they might be "encouraged" to accept it...
...Instead, the election was about rejecting the mean-spirited, intolerant, Republican agenda...

Vol. 4 • December 1998 • No. 14


 
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