That's the Ticket

Sir: After listening to the acceptance speeches of Nixon and Agnew [Aug. 16], I can only comment: thank God--we have two candidates who are speaking for the forgotten middle class. May they find the strength and courage to carry out the power of their convictions and, once again, make America a proud nation.

MARY JO LAKE Norristown, Pa.

Sir: Three months ago, you stated that Maryland's Governor Spiro Agnew, after his defection from Governor Rockefeller, was receiving hints from Mr. Nixon as a possible vice-presidential running mate [May 24]. At the time, it seemed very unlikely to me, but now Governor Agnew turns out to be the number two man on the ticket. Thank you for this insight and good luck on the Demo Veep.

MIKE HOMER Portland, Ore.

Sir: What a night--watching the Republican Convention elect our next President, Hubert Humphrey.

VIRGINIA H. BERK Seattle

Sir: It's official: change G.O.P. from Grand Old Party to Going Out of Politics.

RICHARD A. CUMMINS Indianapolis

Sir: It occurs to me that Richard Nixon's choice of running mate could only mean better slogans for the fall campaign. "A Gnew Nixon," or something like that.

P. M. null

Hamilton, N.Y.

Sir: Here we are, come November, with a Humphrey-Nixon choice, a psychologist's avoidance-avoidance situation. We are the victims of a stagnant two-party system loaded with loyal party hacks transferring favors among themselves with no interest in the people's wishes or best interest. What we need is a little competition, like a fourth party called the Independents, with a ticket like Rockefeller-McCarthy, with a platform of guaranteed jobs, normalcy of foreign politics, a direct primary, a world-federalism outlook and, most of all, a general, honest, political orientation toward the best for all the people. Maybe if enough people felt the same way, we could get organized.

THEODORE W. JOHNSON Williamstown, Mass.

Sir: Nixon stood by his party in its hour of need, and now the party stands by Nixon. It's so simple. I don't understand why I'm so depressed.

DARENE H. LENNON Evanston, Ill.

Sir: I am only ten years old but my mommy let me stay up to watch the convention. She said I would learn a lot. I only went to sleep once. My daddy went to sleep three times.

The part I liked best was when the balloons went down. I also liked the part when the clowns marched around and around. I like Chet and David, but they did not get to march around. They just have to stay in their seats. I guess they can't even go to the bathroom. I am glad Mr. Nixon won, because my daddy says Nixon never wins so I think it was his turn.

BOBBY SIMONS East Orleans, Mass.

Not First but Best

Sir: Eugene McCarthy, if elected, will not be the first "dedicated President-poet" since John Quincy Adams [Aug. 9]. But by most readers' standards, he will be the best. Abraham Lincoln wrote a number of poems, much in the vein of this one, about an acquaintance "who at the age of 19 unaccountably became furiously mad":

And here's an object more of dread, Than aught the grave contains--A human-form, with reason fled, While wretched life remains.

Poor Matthew! Once of genius bright--A fortune-favored child--Now locked for aye, in mental night, A haggard madman wild.

JOHN BREITHAUPT Mount Vernon, Ohio

How It Could End

Sir: Your Essay on "How the War in Viet Nam Might End" [Aug. 9], illustrates how the best minds can be curiously blind. Not once did you mention giant China. Imagine a civil war in Mexico or Canada in which China intervenes from 10,000 miles away with 500,000 troops--would you discuss how to end it all without bothering to take into account the neighboring U.S.?

PINTO COELHO Pompano Beach, Fla.

Sir: The statement that "what the U.S. seeks to demonstrate in Viet Nam is that armed aggression cannot be permitted to succeed," expressed in your Essay and also by so many spokesmen for the U.S. program, is ridiculous. Armed aggression succeeded the moment it was agreed that negotiations begin. The exact measure of its success will be the amount the U.S. agrees to concede, because without the armed aggression there would have been no reason to concede anything at all.

H. B. WATTON Waldwick, NJ.

Birth and the Blues

Sir: Your follow-up article on the Pope's birth-control ban and its repercussions [Aug. 9] was both thorough and lucid. The questions of authority and strict canon law seem to me the real bugaboos. On the one hand, conscience is lauded and upheld, and one priest will absolve the "sin" on Saturday afternoon. Yet on Sunday, from the pulpit, another priest will demand obedience to the Pope and condemn all those who express dissent as fanatical and wrong. How can one relate to both Church and society when the gap has no bridge?

SUSAN C. EFINGER Santa Barbara, Calif.

Sir: In your otherwise excellent coverage of the Pope's encyclical you implant the customary American caricature of the British. In Britain, you say, there will probably be quiet defections. Why defections? Why quiet?

As a British theologian, I'm prepared to say that Humanae Vitae is more catastrophic than the weighty encyclicals of Popes Gregory XVI, Pius IX and Leo XIII, which stated, not so long ago, that the right to freedom of conscience in religious matters is "sheer madness," "against God's law," "tantamount to atheism," etc. Thank God for Vatican II!

Quiet? I'll say this as loudly as you like. Defection? They'll have to throw me; I don't slide easily.

(THE REV.) PETER DE ROSA London

Sir: Those who interpret natural law as decreeing that the only true purpose of the sexual organs is procreation must be studying animals, not man. For mankind, the sexual drive has no season; the female is receptive even when already pregnant. It appears therefore that there is another purpose for sex, in addition to mere generation. Students of natural law should raise their gaze--up to the level of man's nature.

H. R. AHRENS San Diego

Sir: The Pope is correct in outlining a human use of sex that is right, perfect and heroic. But what is involved in most human activities are ways of acting that may be less than perfect but not damning. It is solid Catholic Church theology that a person can form his conscience on moral matters on the basis of any one of various probable opinions on a given subject. It is obvious--from the number of theologians who have publicly expressed their continued conviction that for good reason contraception is an acceptable procedure--that this is still a very probable theological opinion.

BROTHER GEORGE STEFANIK, C.S.C. Notre Dame, Ind.

Sir: If even part of the logic behind the Pope's decision was ". . . just as the ear is for hearing," etc., then I am anxiously awaiting either the obvious further bans on earplugs, nose plugs, eyeshades and diet pills--or a much closer look at logic by Rome.

RUTH WALKER ALBERS Portland, Ore.

Sir: As an ardent music lover, I want to know if it is too much to hope that His Holiness will confirm another tradition of the church and reintroduce the castrati, who contributed so much unearthly beauty to the church choirs of Rome, and elsewhere in Italy, in the 17th and 18th centuries. They were abolished for humanitarian reasons.

J. HAROLD DOUGLAS Dublin

Who, Me?

Sir: Reading about the 58th annual convention of the National Urban League [Aug. 9] reminded me of an Akron Urban League member's answer to my question, "Why don't you Negroes of the middle class get more involved in the slums?"

"Why the hell should I? I'm a Phi Beta Kappa, raised in an upper-middle-class area of Akron, star football player, National Honor Society member, top of my class in high school, graduate of Duke University. What the hell do I know about the slums and its problems? Why don't you go help out in the slums?" There you have it, I think.

BETTY CARROLL Albuquerque

The Meaning of It All

Sir: Even in the much-maligned academic journals, I have never read such solemn nonsense as the allegedly "lucid pessimism" of your Cioran Sampler [Aug. 9]. I really don't think the man is either a philosopher or an intellectual; just a manic-depressive lucky enough to have a publisher.

ROYAL K. BODEY Colon, Mich.

Sir: Nice of you to give a moment to M. Cioran and his lyrical pungencies, but he ought not to be compared with Nietzsche et al., if for no other reason than Cioran has not yet dared to question the basis of his own sense of futility, as obviously he must. Formal logic should not be dismissed without taking gratefully in hand the single legacy of great value it has willed to us: the challenge of the premises.

Having concluded that order, reason, and time are nothing more than nominalistic nonentities in the chaos of the ineluctable human paradox, but that life insists upon being lived nevertheless, he stopped, breathless in adoration at his own poesy. He failed to continue to the inexorable conclusion that meaning will insist upon inserting itself into the human condition, whether it has realistic application or not--and that the search for specific meanings is the inescapable course of every man's life. What Cioran is suffering from is lack of belief in the conclusions of his own thought. Inasmuch as meaning, like murder, will out, each of us has only the choices of seeking it out for ourself or letting it passively happen.

J. G. TURNER Chicago

Description Challenged

Sir: In the article "Building a Biography" [June 21], TIME characterized Brit ish Journalist Jon Kimche unfairly. Mr. Kimche was for 15 years editor of the Jewish Observer and Middle East Review, the official organ of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. However, to my knowledge, he is not, as you state, "known mainly for his sensational anti-Arab diatribes." During the many years that he has reported Middle Eastern affairs, he has never, to my knowledge, published anything that could be so described.

JAMES BELL Bureau Chief TIME Magazine London

How They Died

Sir: Your footnote on the rather bizarre deaths of famous composers [Aug. 16] has made me recall some others: Ernest Chausson (1855-99) died when he drove his bicycle into a wall. Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) died from a carbuncle on his upper lip. Cesar Franck (1822-90) died from complications arising from a mishap in which Franck was run over by a bus. It has "never been decided whether Alban Berg (1885-1935) died from complications due to his bad teeth or from an insect bite on his back. And Marc Blitzstein (1905-64) was killed when several men robbed and beat him.

CHRISTOPHER ROUSE Baltimore

Read It Like It Is

Sir: In regard to the National Education Association's compilation of controversial literature [Aug. 9], you state, "Surprisingly, many of the books were condemned by teachers themselves." There is nothing surprising in this when one considers the lack of progressive and realistic attitudes inherent in the N.E.A. As a high school English teacher, I have used three of the questionable texts in the classroom with considerable success. Perhaps the N.E.A. should concentrate its poll-taking facilities on improving its own national image rather than attempting to meddle in literary matters.

(MRS.) VIRGINIA K. SAPONE Malvern, Pa.

Sir: I am a ninth-grade student, and I have read Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Orwell's 1984 and Golding's Lord of the Flies, and these are only a few of the "dirty books" I have read. I found nothing at all wrong with them, except they told me a lot about life, which I eventually would have had to learn anyway.

DEBORAH RECHNITZ Denver

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