Riots & Responsibilities

Sir: Once again the desperate lot of the Negroes and the conditions in which they live in Northern ghettos has caught a city by surprise [July 21]. This is all the more horrifying when we realize that the federal, state and local governments seem at a loss to know what to do. Congressional leaders seem more concerned with punishment of the rioters than in identifying and treating the causes that have been festering for years. Our country has become so involved with foreign affairs that the domestic problems, more immediate and potentially destructive, are receiving secondhand attention.

JAMES V. ASH

Manhattan

Sir: The TIME Cover does a disservice to Newark. By featuring Mr. Smith, you have increased a misfit's questionable fame. My children and the nation would have been more enlightened as to man's bravery, honor and humanity had you shown Fire Captain Moran or Patrolman Toto, who sacrificed their lives so that Newark citizens may live free of fear.

DR. AND MRS. R. A. VLATTEN

Newark

Sir: I wish to register a strong protest against the slant of your story. Your portrayal of the riot as baseless and unreasoned shows a lack of understanding of the problems the Negro community faces. The moral responsibility that is yours in working toward solution of these problems is great. The kind of slant you gave is no help in finding an answer.

(THE REV.) DAVID T. NELSON

Bethel Lutheran Church

Chicago

Sir: It is surprising that you do not suggest a correlation between the riots and the much-discussed dissatisfactions of youth with the soullessness of a materialistic culture. I wonder if these riots are entirely the fruit of discrimination, if these Negroes are indeed those who dream of job and suburban serenity. It seems to me, rather, that the rioters share the bored frustration and inarticulate revulsion against society that erupts in riots of young whites on vacation or in orgies of vandalism by elite young partygoers--or in the less sensational but more disturbing apathy of many of my fellow college students. The ghetto explosions differ because they have the continuing impetus of legitimate grievances inflamed by a popular movement and a war cry, but they share the same "ungrateful" indifference and taunting arrogance. I do not defend rage or lawlessness, but I think such a link helps explain the bewilderment of older Negroes at their children's sabotage of the larger cause of civil rights.

CAMILLE A. PAGLIA

Syracuse, N.Y.

Pillars of Wisdom

Sir: Apropos of "Arabia Decepta: A People Self-Deluded" [July 14] is the poetic prose of T. E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

"Arabs could be swung on an idea as on a cord . . . they were as unstable as water, and like water would perhaps finally prevail. Since the dawn of life, in successive waves they have been dashing themselves against the coasts of flesh. Each wave was broken, but, like the sea, wore away ever so little of the granite on which it failed, and some day, ages yet, might roll unchecked over the place where the material world had been, and God would move upon the face of those waters . . . The wash of that wave, thrown back by the resistance of vested things, will provide the matter of the following wave, when in the fullness of time the sea shall be raised once more."

Are not those "vested things" the oil and the arms, and are not those "coasts of flesh" the Israeli army?

ROBERT F. WERNLE

Crawfordsville, Ind.

Sir: Your Essay is a masterpiece of nonsense, apparently triggered by childish bafflement at the Arabs' refusal to accept defeat. An equally childish solution of the riddle is offered: they are simply nuts, these Arabs! The fact is, these funny Arabs are the proud heirs of a formidable culture that once dominated the civilized world. That is why they refuse to tremble in abject terror before the Israeli bandits. They will go on fighting. If there is any "Decepta," it is America, which refuses to understand the Arabs' heroic determination not to bow to brute force.

A. S. ALI

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Sir: Hurray for TIME'S Essay! It hurts, but most of it is true.

J. CHAO (AN ARAB)

Urdorf, Switzerland

Sir: You fail to mention the fundamental reason for the Arabs' refusal to "accept Israel's extended hand," i.e., the fact that 800,000 Arabs were dispossessed by the establishment of Israel. Instead, you raise a smoke screen of insult, speaking scornfully of arrested development, morbid eroticism, florid exaggeration, etc. Moreover, the Essay contains its own contradictions. Even after crediting the Arabs with important contributions to mathematics, chemistry and medicine, the writer notes that "missing in Arab science was any true sense of creativity." Many Arabs (one a Nobel laureate) hold professorships in American and European universities; they and hundreds of Arab graduate students are engaged in creative research. Imagine their dismay on reading your inhospitable words. This Essay can only widen the gulf of misunderstanding between the Mideast and the U.S.

STANLEY E. KERR

Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry

American University of Beirut

Princeton, N. J.

Sir: Your clear reporting and unbiased analysis of this very messy situation cannot help being of great benefit to everyone concerned. It should be compulsory reading for every U.N. delegate. It would then light the way for all Mideast countries to assume their responsibilities to all human beings and to world peace.

SOL A. DANN Detroit

Touching a Nurv

Sir: Super zap to TIME for dignifying hippiedom by making it the subject of a cover story. Your punch line particularly enraged me: Engaging? Engagging, rather! Are TIME'S reporters working hippies?

The hippie movement is comparable to a temper tantrum. Peace, love and honesty as goals are not original with the hippies. The hippie conception of Utopia is sentimentalized love, license in place of honesty, distortion of the arts and of ethics, replacement of the peace pipe by pot. You state that gentle treatment is accorded hippies by "people in authority." The reason for this just could be the tendency to take these people's exhibitionism as a serious movement, or to fear to be considered "straight." Why not be proud to be? Granted that materialism and other abuses abound in our society. Are the hippies not substituting others even more virulent, even anachronistic? How long can society sustain this group of parasites without itself crumbling?

PAULINE WOODARD

Nashville

Sir: We thoroughly enjoyed your story, but we find it rather hard to believe that no rock band ever used the name Diogenes and the Cynics. In fact, until we changed our name to the Optik Nurv, we were Diogenes and the Cynics.

BILL DOWNALL, JIM FOSTER DENNY MOLL, TOM MOLL

Sleepy Eye, Minn.

Sir: Please accept my gentle, loving indication to you that your quasi-learned etymology of the word "hippie" completely misses the mark. When the words "hip" and "hipster" were real cool, there was also the word "hippie"; it referred to an unhip person trying to be hip but not really making it. I suggest that this can tell us something about today's hippies.

JAMES T. ANDERSON

New Delhi

Sir: Hippies are spoiled brats, scared, lazy, and unwilling to take their place in society. With all there is to be done in this badly troubled world, why must there be such waste of talent? One can only hope that the novelty will wear off and that these nuts will get back into the scheme of things. To live in today's world has to be the most exciting, the most challenging and the most fun. Those poor kids don't know what they are missing.

JEAN FALCONI

Honesdale, Pa.

Sir: The June issue of the magazine Seat-lie offers a definition of the term hippie that conflicts with yours: "When opium smokers were getting their kicks, they used to lie down and smoke their pipes, throwing their weight on one hip. Thus, someone smoking opium was termed 'on the hip.' Years later American jazz musicians took up the word, applying it indiscriminately to anyone on drugs. In the present-day vernacular, it suggests looking beyond the camouflage of everyday reality, usually with the help of LSD and pot, but not always."

LORNA CHURCHILL

Watertown, Mass.

No Stranger in Paradise

Sir: Your story on Tonga [July 14] reawakens for me many sparkling memories of a true South Sea island paradise. I spent nine months in Tonga in 1942 and 1943 with the U.S. Army's 7th Evacuation Hospital. Even after a quarter-century, your story evokes vivid recollections of a lush tropical island; of blue and gold days and black and silver nights beneath the Southern Cross; of a perfect climate; of the graceful tracery of waving palms in the soft trade winds silhouetted against a tropical moon or a luminous sea; of pure white surf crashing in over the coral reef; of the fabulous blowholes shooting fountains of glittering spray high into the air--a most unforgettable sight on a full-moon-lit night; of a stately lady who was every inch a queen and got attention purely by her queenly bearing and grace; of a happy, intelligent, active, extraordinarily healthy people whose children could swim and ride horseback almost as soon as they could walk, and who could talk about Oliver Cromwell and Abraham Lincoln as well as any British or American schoolboy; and where there was no public welfare and no unemployment.

There are few places that come close to the climatic, economic, social and medical perfection Tonga enjoys. I wish for the king and his extremely fortunate subjects a continuation of the long life, happiness and prosperity that have always blessed their lucky land.

STANLEY D. VER NOOY

Bogota, N.J.

Young Fog-Piercer

Sir: Your report [July 14] on the discovery of the Norsemen's magical sun-stones involves three one-field specialists: an anthropologist, an airline navigator and a crystallographer. It also mentions "a little child who led them": the boy of ten who penetrated the mental fog that enshrouds and separates the searches of one-field specialists.

This research feat is as magical for our time as the Vikings' oceanic navigation was for theirs, and quite as important for us to understand. As a specialist in synthesis who has done this kind of navigation for years, I venture to guess that this boy's capacity to guide one-field specialists stems in large part from a close and affectionate relation with his father as a navigator not only of the sky but of life as a whole. Am I correct in suggesting that this is the magical catalyst that permits a small boy to propose, and his father to follow the proposal, of interdisciplinary and intergenerational research of classic elegance?

EDWARD F. HASKELL

Council for Unified Research and Education

Manhattan

Time, Please

Sir: You call Bulova Watch Company "the nation's biggest watch producer and importer" [June 16]. Wrong. With total 1966 sales of $143 million against Bulova's $123 million, we are.

J. LEHMKUHL President U. S. Time Corp. Waterbury, Conn.

> Perhaps, but who could have guessed, since privately owned U. S. Time Corp. has heretofore kept its sales figures secret?

The Life We Lead

Sir: As one of the 90,000 homosexuals in metropolitan San Francisco, I look forward to the day when California will follow the lead of Great Britain and reform the laws dealing with our behavior [July 14]. The life we homosexuals lead is difficult enough because of prejudice and ignorance. The laws proscribing sexual conduct between consenting adults of the same sex create a paradise for blackmailers and an inferno for those of us who ask no more than to be accepted on our own merits.

THOMAS M. EDWARDS San Francisco

Can You Beat That ?

Sir: Apropos of "New Punctuation Mark" [July 21]: no doubt the interabang fills the need of some writers, although I can usually make do with a simple exclamation point. More needful, I think, is the pronequark. The kind of sentence that demands the pronequark arises quite frequently. It looks like this: "May I ask you to print this in an early issue"

THEODORE M. BERNSTEIN The New York Times Manhattan

"Flash!"

Sir: Walter Winshall [June 23], whose Harvard classmates say he's a genius, can't be so smart. Can't even spell his name.

WALTER WINCHELL Manhattan

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