Casual

...I thank myself for my permission to publish it...

...Someone who does not qualify is Walter Cronkite, the man with a face only a nation could love, who recently bestirred himself to allow that he feels all presidential candidates "could show true leadership by agreeing to one or more genuine debates to set forth their foreign policy...

...Can you see my fist come down, my thumbs go up, my little touchdown dance commence...

...Odd, but he never answered...

...One way of judging a magazine is by the quality of the letters it prints...

...Any magazine with intellectual pretensions ought to garner letters that are disputatious and probably tendentious...

...Another is V.A...

...Magazines that print letters in praise of themselves ought to be distrusted...

...What I am looking for is a man or woman after my own heart: someone publicly announcing a heterodox opinion that is courageously, elegantly congruent with one of mine...

...Carney, of Stowe, Vermont, a black American, who feels it "a supreme insult to any decent, fair-minded black American" to suggest that blacks "should be held to lower ethical standards because they cannot comport themselves properly...

...Many moons ago I had a man named Edwin R. Newman, the television broadcaster and self-appointed language expert, stalking me in the letters columns of intellectual magazines...

...I almost wish someone other than I had written the Casual on acknowledgments in books in these pages a few weeks ago, so that I could send in an addendum letter having to do with an author acknowledging himself, as Philip Horne, in his Henry James: A Life in Letters, does for his use of a Henry James letter that he happens to own: "Only one of these letters is in a private collection...

...Do you suppose he knocked off for the rest of the day after squeezing out that brilliant missive...

...I once wrote an essay titled "I Like A Gershwin Tune" that elicited a lovely letter from a man who told an anecdote illustrating the genuine modesty of Ira Gershwin, to whom it never occurred to use his own celebrity to acquire a reservation at a crowded restaurant...

...A good letter to the editor should never, Cronkitically, pontificate...

...I did my best to greet each of his letters with a smile and a karate chop, until, finally, he desisted...

...and if he is any good at polemic, he will usually be able to apply to his unhappy correspondent the intellectual equivalent of the Cobra Twist, a hold devised and applied by the former wrestler Cyclone Anaya—a combined half nelson and reverse leg twist—that left his opponents briefly writhing before falling unconscious to the mat...

...And since you'll never guess why, I'll let Walter, the old clichemeister himself, tell you: because "foreign policy has never been more important to the future of the United States and the world...

...Not all letters to the editor need be angry, or take on the burden of straightening everyone else out...

...Long before that, living in the South, I wrote an occasional letter to the Arkansas Gazette, arguing with the foreign policy of President Charles de Gaulle...

...Occasionally I find them...

...On his television talk show, Steve Allen used to put on his hat and shift into the highest possible dudgeon to read angry letters from the New York Daily News, doing a man who had had it up to here (just above the eyebrows, I believe), was ticked to the max, wasn't going to take it anymore, was being driven just short of insane and maybe a little beyond...

...I am searching for people, in other words, whose perceptions are as subtle, whose cast of mind as impressively independent, whose intelligence quite as radiant as my own...

...The etiquette is to allow the writer under attack to answer all such letters...

...Wish I had thought to write a letter to the editor to say that...

...A great woman, I think...

...It should instead show anywhere from mild to entirely out-of-control exasperation...

...Like the Manhattan attorney who, when asked whether he had ulcers, answered, "No, but I give them," I do not now write letters to the editor but answer them...

...Dying of cancer, Lucy Dawidowicz, the historian of the Holocaust, when handed the printed version of what she knew to be her last article for Commentary, remarked on her deathbed to Norman Podhoretz that, while she didn't especially look forward to death, "At least I won't have to answer the letters from readers...

...Letters to the editor in too great number can weary a writer...

...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...

...Such a person is Sheila Feit, of Syosset, New York, who nicely blasts a New York Times writer for fearing technology, then adds that she has "chosen from the beginning not to spend much time online, to play computer games or to use the computer for daily activities," and adds further that, though she wrote her letter in longhand, she is sending it by e-mail...

...Some of the best provide a charming addendum...