Letters
Letters Much Too Something I very much appreciated Steven Waldman’s “Search for the Three Little Pigs” (November). It’s curious that Mr. Waldman posits the Disney version as moral compass....
...but we are in fact the United States of America, and have been thoroughly insulated from the threat of subjugation by our geography and the historical accident that none of our neighbors has risen to superpower status...
...Further, as an employer of unskilled workers, I find that there are many men and women not on welfare who are loolung for full-time employment...
...Stories must depict senior citizens as vigorous, attractive, and agreeable...
...And so on...
...Whatever it was doing in Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, and Iraq, the military was not protecting our freedoms...
...The unkind would say that they were functioning as hired thugs...
...Anyone who went to the Midwest during the floods of 1993, as I did, could have told Mr...
...JOHN R. MOOT Cambridge, MA Dixie’s Dark Side The review of Dixie Rising (November) was very interesting and I certainly will read the book...
...In 1955, the Shah dismissed Zahedi and, with CIA and Mossad assistance, created a modern security force that, in the absence of nationalist legitimacy, was absolutely essential to his survival as one of the United States’ anti-communist allies in the Middle East...
...The 1953 CIA-sponsored coup did not simply install the Shah (who always wanted to be much more than a constitutional monarch), however, but also overthrew the popular liberal nationalist government of Dr...
...In Oranges, when John McPhee describes his unsuccessful search for a Florida restaurant serving fresh orange juice, a waitress explains that people prefer frozen concentrate because it’s predictable...
...What is a child to glean from this message...
...Only in the Coast Guard have women been cornpletely integrated (ashore and aboard ships and boats)-and since 1978 at that: ANDREW WEBB San Diego, CA Fare Thee Welfare In “Reforming Welfare Reform” (November), Michelle Cottle asks, “Is this bill intended to help balance the budget or to develop a more effective welfare program?’’ Perhaps a brief review of history might help her answer her own question and also challenge her assumption that “entitlement programs act as a trap...
...But it’s long gone now...
...As a person born in Virginia, I know that is wishful thinking...
...Mossedeq’s government was replaced by a brutal military government headed by General Zahedi, a one-time collaborator with Nazi efforts in Iran...
...To complicate matters, states like California have specific requirements for the tales students residing in their borders can read...
...When it floods, they go back and rebuild because there’s no place else to go...
...Mohammed Mossedeq...
...Why should I give preference to someone coming off welfare...
...If they can get people into any job, they can erase them from the rolls and give.up tracking them...
...SUSAN OHANIAN Charlotte, VT G.I...
...The aid was never intended to be only for people “in-between jobs...
...After all, in the end, everybody, improvident and evil alike, survives to sing and dance a jig or terrorize the weak on another day...
...handicapped in favorable roles...
...The US...
...Grouping these people with the elite of Malibu and Miami is grossly misleading...
...no junk food allowed in a story...
...this is really good...
...But also on my mind was the thought that Ms...
...Moskos has had a love affair with the Army for years, perhaps since he was a conscript back in the ’50s...
...FREDERICK C. THAYER Pittsburgh, PA The article “Reforming Welfare Reform” omitted consideration of a major obstacle to success: medical insurance...
...Policymakers know full well that jobs will not be available for all...
...Then again, he seems to have been against full integration of women in the Army-for at least a decade...
...Aid to single or widowed mothers was established because jobs were and always would be unavailable...
...Waldman still hadn’t quite gotten it...
...During the Shah‘s reign, thousands of Iranians were jailed, tortured, or executed for anti-regime activities...
...Women were denied aid if they went to work, the original definition of “welfare cheating...
...However, it was not very discriminating, painting the truly unfortunate with the same broad brush strokes as the greedy...
...NORMAL...
...John Solomon’s article on the habit of wealthy residents in disaster-prone areas to rely on the government to protect them against property loss (“Flirting With Disaster,” October) was informative and interesting...
...If Mr...
...Waldman thinks modern adapters ruin the classic fairy tales he remembers, wait until he sees the reading texts that will be foisted on his hapless child...
...Unfortunately, Mr...
...The only interest shown by governors is to get people off the welfare rolls...
...Once these people are lost from view, there will no longer be a “problem” to solve...
...has had, for many years now, a bipartisan policy to maintain high unemployment in order to control inflation by discouraging workers from asking for higher pay...
...The Army is most certainly not the Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, or even Marine Corps...
...With every special interest group in the country-from feminists to evangelical Christians to pigeon fanciers-exerting pressure to make sure textbooks don’t step on their values, many stories children love are just too fraught with risk for most textbook editorial committees to countenance...
...But the pretense that they were protecting America and preserving liberty is a far more egregious lie than any perpetrated by the much-maligned liberals...
...Yes, Disney lets the’big bad wolf get away...
...The poor live there because it’s all they can afford...
...Gee,” I thought, “someone’s finally taken a good look at the military...
...But I do not agree that manners are morals...
...BALLING Rochester, MN Iruined Charles Peters’s piece on the shameful history of the CIA (“Tilting at Windmills,” November) appeared to suggest, perhaps inadvertently, that the consequences of the CIA coup in Iran were not as bad as those in Guatemala because in the latter a democratically elected government was overthrown...
...People don’t see the connection because there is none...
...But his feelings for the Army make him see all the other services through green-colored glasses...
...Jerks I am very much in sympathy with Amy Waldmah’s piece “G.1.s: Not Your Average Joes” (November) until I get to what may be the emotional heart of the matter: “People don’t, in fact, see the connection between the presence of a strong military and their right to disparage it...
...Fresh is either too sour or too watery or too something...
...Land at the lower elevations is generally cheap and uninsurable at any price...
...Moskos has been so fixated on the Army for so long, he fails to see that each service has its own culture, its own problems, and its own ways of working out these problems...
...Moskos might have us believe...
...Auburn, AL During and after reading Amy Waldman’s article, I was of two minds...
...Some state proposals include full family medical benefits for two years after leaving welfare, but what happens when those benefits expire...
...Most businesses with jobs for people with limited skills are not providing full medical benefits at no cost to the employee...
...While that demeanor may make things more pleasant on the surface, it does nothing to correct basic race and class problems...
...There must be a balanced mix of racial and ethnic groups...
...More and more these days, people are worried that the stories children read might be “too something...
...Solomon that, for the most part, wealthy property owners along the Mississippi are on elevations well above the floodplain, with spectacular views of the river...
...The energy behind this apotheosis of the military surely comes from World War 11...
...In fact, Iran, particularly in the 1970s, had one of the worst human rights records worldwide...
...As far as I’m concerned, the South has a long way to go toward correcting its deep racial bias...
...Such mothers were expected to stay home and raise their children, sometimes considered a noble task by advocates of “family” values...
...So I’m not happy when I hear that the rest of the country is becoming more like the South...
...The pretense that our ‘‘strong military” has somehow preserved our freedoms might have some credibility if we were Luxembourg...
...A kinder, more educated interpretation would be that they were instruments of national policydiplomacy by other means...
...WILLIAM FENTON Alexandria, VA...
...It was a great war, and the Americans were wonderful in it...
...FARHAD HOMAYOUN via e-mail Floodplain Freeloaders...
...PETER D. JOHNSON JR...
...By relying on Charles Moskos, she missed the forest for one of the trees...
...The military has its uses and merits, but let’s cut the crap about the military preserving whatever it is that makes America great...
...Medical care for one’s children is understandably too important for the welfare recipient to abandon for a private-sector job without benefits...
...They are not about to spend enough for caseworkers, support and regulation of child care facilities, and training programs...
...The recent disclosures about sexual harassment and abuse in the Army are evidence that all is not as well as Mr...
...women in active, nontraditional roles...
...Letters Much Too Something I very much appreciated Steven Waldman’s “Search for the Three Little Pigs” (November...
...While race relations in the military are definitely better than they are in society at large, the situation vis-ivis women is not so rosy...
...Southerners, more than any other group I know, can be very polite to your face and be anything but kind behind your back...
Vol. 29 • January 1997 • No. 1
