Letters
Letters Hopeless Ever since Lyndon Johnson ushered the 1964 Civil and Voting Rights bills through Congress, the Republican Party has been very effective at using race as a wedge issue to...
...Mintz says his source for the $60 billion figure was “Matthew Miller, who as a former official of the Office of Management and Budget is surely credible...
...One still needs to check the facts against what Miller says...
...With this in mind, I was struck by a sense of virtual reality to see a picture of J.C...
...With Jack Ward Thomas quitting, you’ll have a chance to do another story on the selection of his replacement...
...Many of my peers struggled to find decent work...
...Now we are beginning to see accidents caused by technologically induced cockpit confusion...
...The standard solution has been to call for more electronic gimmickry in the cockpit...
...Watts may be the wave of the future, it also points out that Mr...
...Peters notes, and which so exercises the indignation of laymen, is common in most bureaucracies...
...As to re-created dialogue in such an excellent work as Jonathan Harr’s A CivilAction being a “deep letdown” for Mr...
...In 1980, Reagan began his campaign for president in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers had been murdered just 16 years previously...
...The apparent inflation of performance reports which Mr...
...Peters suggests that an inflated evaluation report was responsible for the assignment of an unqualified pilot to the Ron Brown flight...
...However, I found Morton Mintz lacking in his response to Sanford Thier’s letter (October) questioning Mintz’s claim that Social Security recipients earning over $50,000 a year cost the trust fund $60 billion a year...
...A few months ago, American Airlines Flight 965 crashed in Columbia when the pilot, absorbed in sorting out the abundance of computerized navigation aids available to him, forgot that there were mountains around and ran into one of them...
...Worst of all, our American caste system fronts itself as a meritocracy...
...In short, Mr...
...While the article purports to ask why more African-Americans don’t vote Republican, and insinuates that black conservatives like J.C...
...In fact, a pilot’s flying skills are rarely a significant element of an evaluation report unless some exceptional factors are involved...
...DAN BENBOW Madison, Wisconsin Bad Answer I always enjoy the responses Monthly writers provide readers...
...TOM KOVALICKY Grangeville, Idabo...
...With four kids in my family entering college in the same general time frame, it seemed a no-brainer to pick what Many magazine called one of the top five state schools in the country-one of the best values in education...
...For example, the term “properly configured for landing” does not mean, as Mr...
...About 65 percent of fatal aircraft accidents are caused by pilot error...
...Looking at this record, it’s a wonder J.C...
...Tuition up the road at Cornel1 was perhaps three or four times that at Binghamton...
...Tilting at Windmills,” October...
...In the intervening period nothing seems to have changed...
...We confirmed that NTu’s numbers were accurate, based on the CBO’S 1994 report “Reducing Entitlement Spending...
...Bernard Adelman Winthrop, Massachussets A Different League Your continuing push to encourage bright high school kids to choose outstanding non-Ivy League colleges is a breath of fresh air...
...W A is an awesome school, and I hardly suspect I’ll be eschewing its on-campus interviewing process, but I can’t help feeling as though the whole system stinks...
...Thier’s question still seems inadequately answered, Miller’s credibility notwithstanding...
...If they do not, collectively, regain their composure and respectability, the agency will be manipulated by the politicians into the whipped dog posture...
...Unfortunately, such fatal errors seem to happen as often among toprated airlines as they do in the somewhat looser environment of military flying...
...Users and writers of such documents usually understand the subtlety of their structure and are quite capable of extracting the real messages they carry...
...Nonetheless, the facts are that the pilot was aiming in the wrong direction when he attempted to land, and that his previous commanding oficer wishes he hadpointed out the pilot’s earlier errors in the landing process when he evaluated the pilot...
...BART EPSTEIN Charlottesville, Virginia New Graft Coming Your article on the Forest Service (“Dead Wood,” October) did a great job of putting the handle in the right place...
...But surely any reasonably intelligent person, not committed to conspiracy theories, who saw the movie wouldn’t be impressed by anything except the top-notch editing, which made the double-feature time seem to pass so swiftly...
...Why does that make him “surely credible...
...Letters Hopeless Ever since Lyndon Johnson ushered the 1964 Civil and Voting Rights bills through Congress, the Republican Party has been very effective at using race as a wedge issue to direct the anxiety of middle and workingclass whites at the poor (many black) in inner cities, rather than at the ravages of capitalism...
...it means, among other hqp, that the wheels have been extended and that the flaps have been set at the correct angle...
...Peters into an analytical labyrinth from which he fails to emerge...
...This has taken many forms...
...In 1988, Bush used Wllie Horton to paint Dukakis as soft on crime...
...What is surely incredible is that Miller uses NTU as a source and that this somehow became fact in Mintz’s article...
...Watts on your October cover next to the title “The Great Black Hope...
...This may prove to be the “era of the last chance” for the Forest Service...
...More than 20 years ago, in December 1974, TWA Flight 514 hit a small mountain while approaching Dulles Airport and 92 people died...
...He had neglected to study the approach chart beforehand, leaving it to the ground controller to guide him in...
...David Beck Carrboro,North Carolina Editors’ reply: The National Taxpayers Union study fimn which Matt Miller got his data was based on information Ffom the Congressional Budget Ofice, according to the study’s author, Neil Howe...
...Anyone familiar with NTU knows that its methodologies are lacking at best and intentionally deceitful at worst...
...Improper configuration can lead to the embarrassment of an unintended belly landing...
...There are a lot of wild cards out there...
...Easterbrook rightly points out that “conspiracy theory” works, like Oliver Stone’syFq are phony...
...But suppose for the moment that some ordinarily emotionally balanced viewer had been struck with the goofy notion that LBJ had been part of the assassination plot-wouldn’t a moment’s reflection have elicited a feeling of shame and later a release of laughter at oneself for fleetingly succumbing to irrationality...
...Flying Blind Charles Peters’s analysis of Air Force rating practices and his translation of “Air Force lingo” (“Tilting at Windmills,” October) contain some misconceptions that should not be allowed to pass without comment...
...In 1968, there was Nixon’s “Southern strategy...
...Through sheer effort and hard work, I’ve been able to achieve opportunities simply handed to Ivy League students...
...Ifthere is ajaw in Miiier’s figures, it is in the assumption that the data can simply be updatedfor inflation...
...I wholeheartedly agree that there’s outstanding education to be had outside the Ivy League, but feel it is important that your younger readers understand a bit of what the real world is like as they are making their decisions...
...Indeed, the editor’s note says “Miller says he derived the figure from a 1991 National Taxpayers Union analysis...
...PAUL N. NASH oakton, Virginia Editors’ reply: Charlie Peters, whose military rank never rose above private, concedes he should not have tried to d$ne “properly configured...
...Too Much Ado Please permit me to express reservations about Gregg Easterbrook’s benevolent and well-expressed concern about the baleful effects on “the American mind” of phony realism in movies and re-created dialogue in books (“It’s Unreal,” October...
...The airliner was “properly configured” and pointing in the right direction, but the pilot’s “situational awareness” was defective...
...Peters believes, that the aircraft is pointed in the proper direction...
...In my opinion, the Ivy League is a front for socioeconomic snobbery...
...However, it is the technical language that leads Mr...
...The real answer is to train pilots better...
...With no football team and an abundance of brilliant but solidly middle-class students, Binghamton’s overall reputation did not open doors...
...On-campus recruiting was virtually nil...
...Easterbrook, I would respectfully ask him whether he felt the same letdown after reading Pericles’s speech or Plato’s Dialogues or the dialogue in the Scriptures...
...After graduation as high school valedictorian with strong SAT scores, I considered the State University of New York at Binghamton to be my dream college...
...Watts (and more broadly the Republican Party) can lay claim to caring about the problems of African-Americans-let alone that a sober publication like The Wmhington Monthly would devote print space to such window dressing...
...For this purpose all pilots are assumed to be equally competent unless there is a substantial deviation from the norm...
...Four years or so later I graduated with a wealth of knowledge, a plethora of wonderful experiences, and not a single “connection” worth writing home about...
...Now, as a student at top-10 law school (The University of Virginia), I find myself strangely uneasy about being treated like royalty...
...Watts voted for cuts in school lunches, welfare, Medicaid, student loans, Legal Services, crime prevention programs, the WIC program, and Headstart, cuts that disproportionately hit AfricanAmericans, while supporting an array of tax cuts that disproportionately favor the well-off...
...The airplane hit a mountain at 1,700 feet when it should have been at 3,500 feet...
Vol. 28 • December 1996 • No. 12
