The Fortas Affair

Sir: While many Americans are feeling rage, frustration and indignation at the Fortas affair [May 23], I believe many of us feel a more hurting emotion--that of disappointment. We don't all agree with the Supreme Court's decisions and rulings, however, most of us accept and abide by them because we believe that these men on this high court are "the epitome of honor among men ..."

Now we find that the cream of the crop is really only curdled milk.

MRS. W. L. POPE Roswell, N. Mex.

Sir: I was strongly in favor of having Mr. Fortas confirmed as Chief Justice last year. In the light of recent events, I hoped even more ardently that he would step down.

I say a plague on all three houses--the legislative, the executive and the judicial ! Until all three adopt a rigid code of ethics and stick to it, this kind of outcry is cant and hypocrisy.

I dare say that if the same standards that drove Mr. Fortas from the court were applied to the Congress and to the executive branch of Government, many heads would roll.

HARRY W. SCHACTER Manhattan

Sir: Alas, another slightly tarnished, slightly tattered liberal bites the dust. Abe Fortas, like the Smothers brothers, was a victim of the Establishment. Free and constructive speech, once valued as a privileged medium of criticism, is fast becoming a farcical political device of the haves. With the possibility of four liberal seats being vacated soon, the conservatives are chuckling. God help us if another Taft Era is the result.

ROD WILLIAMS Brockport, N.Y.

Damaging Display?

Sir: If the average, middle-class wage earner of America was as disgusted as I was after reading the account of "Hunger" [May 16], then I would imagine that it was one of the most self-damaging displays yet staged by those on welfare rolls. With reference to the "filth-encrusted" gymnasium, what is preventing the underprivileged from cleaning up the place? And as for the food stamps being "more trouble than they're worth," most of us have to exert ourselves to some extent to get food for our tables--some of us even have jobs. The biggest mistake the Government could make would be to discontinue the stamps and disburse cash. Haven't we learned by this time that the majority of these people don't have the background or the desire to spend their money for necessities first and luxuries second?

I have no complaint about the legitimate welfare cases, but none of those persons pictured with that article looked underfed, aged or handicapped. If ever a photo proved you can't buy respect with giveaway programs, that was it.

R. M. MORLEY Lyman, Neb.

Like Alice's Party

Sir: I would like to commend you on your very careful, well-developed and painfully true discussion of the massive problems that Egypt faces in trying to enter into the modern industrial world that Israel has reveled in since its inception [May 16].

However, I feel that your position regarding the ability of Nasser to compromise and reach out for a settlement while Israel, seeking an illusory military security, refuses figuratively and literally to give ground, is like Alice's at the Mad Hatter's tea party. Logic simply has no place in the aura of the Middle East.

KARIM BARKAWI Chairman

American Arab Institute Newport Beach, Calif.

Sir: I am a Palestinian, and this phrase shocked me: "The Palestinian children were being taught as their primary subject hatred for Israel." It's not true. I am 20 years old now, and from the time my father left Tiberias in 1948 until the 1967 war, we never spoke of Israel in our house. If I am thinking of joining the fedayeen now, it's not because I hate Israel, but because I love my country.

Perhaps now we are a bitter people, but only because we feel that the world was, and is still, unjust toward us and that the "four bigs" took part in chasing us from our country. Neither Nasser nor Dayan nor the four bigs, who after killing the victim are trying now to revive him, can give peace to the region. Peace comes with justice, and justice means our return home.

We are not fighting against Israel; we are fighting for a Palestine as it existed once and as it will once again.

GEORGES MOURAD Nantes, France

Shearing the Sheep

Sir: I have felt for some time that the real issue being argued between the mature younger generation and the immature older generation is simply life v. death. Nowhere has this sad conclusion been more vividly and clearly illustrated than in the recent clash at Berkeley over the "People's Park" [May 23].

I am sick with disgust at the behavior of the so-called authorities, who far too often react to every moral question raised by the young with incredible stupidity and obscene cruelty. This grandmother is full of contempt for the lazy, sloppy sheep of her generation who prefer to maim or kill a child rather than question their own joyless values.

(MRS.) MARJORIE G. REID Lima, Ohio

Ultimate Breakthrough

Sir: I agree with my party leader, Hubert Humphrey, that Howard Lee's victory over me in being elected mayor of the town of Chapel Hill is "a new breakthrough in Southern politics" [May 16]. For all of my adult life I have worked for the elimination of racial discrimination in this community, and I welcome the climate that has made it possible for a Negro to be elected to this town's highest office.

But as the guy who got "broken through" in this "breakthrough," I look forward to the day when a candidate's color will have no bearing whatsoever on his electability to office. That will be the real breakthrough.

ROLAND GIDUZ Chapel Hill, N.C.

Gall Stones

Sir: A very obvious attack on religion in this country took place May 4, 1969 when a man had the unmitigated gall to walk into a church and demand 60% of its annual income for "reparation" for slavery [May 16]. I question the true motives of people like Forman. I don't believe they are after reparation; I believe they are after something bigger, whether it be an attempt to establish black supremacy, or part of a plan even more nefarious. Slavery died over 100 years ago, and today's Negro is no more a slave than is today's white man a slavemaster.

The church members shouldn't have left; Forman should have--by the nape of his neck and the seat of his pants.

WILLIAM M. TILLEY Stockton, Calif.

Sir: First colleges, now churches; the militants obviously have a shrewd sense of where to find the weakest victims. What next? Beauty parlors? Old folks' homes? You will notice they never try to disrupt pro football games.

ERIC JULBER

Los Angeles

Sir: If the Negro is seeking "reparations" for being exploited, perhaps he should turn to the descendants of the African chieftains who so freely sold their own tribesmen to the American slave traders. DAVID B. PERRY Cincinnati

Falsetto Voices

Sir: Your coverage of campus disturbances has been most meticulous. However, you, in common with other magazines and other media, persist in describing campuses as intellectual communities. Do you truly believe that a concourse of post-adolescents constitutes an intellectual community? Granted, we must listen to the cacophonous yelping from the occupied college library, but we must listen because the unruly young are the voice of the times, not because they are the voice of the intellectuals. In this country, we have hazy notions about what makes an intellectual: currently the term seems to mean someone who read quite a bit of Beowulf in Freshman English.

If reporters honestly wanted to know what intellectual communities think about Viet Nam, race relations and other maddening matters, they'd do better to interview museum curators, NASA officials, or the ladies of the local conservationists' league. Heaven only knows what constitutes a genuine, worth-listening-to intellectual, but heaven does know that it takes more than one semester on the dean's list and one ride in a paddy wagon.

(MRS.) CAROL SANDERS Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Saints Alive

Sir: Pope Paul's patrological housecleaning ["The Saints Go Marching Out," May 16] in the name of "modernity" marks a curious tactical reversal. For almost two millennia the church passed off its myth as historical truth. When this stance was undermined by modern cosmography and anthropology, the church began promoting instead increasingly reason-divorced myth-dogma, e.g., the immaculate conception and bodily assumption of St. Mary. At least the implication was "Here is myth for myth's sake, it's good for your souls," a kind of return to Tertullian's "Credo quia absurdum." Now suddenly there is a new obsession with narrow historicity, and the Pope seems ready to jettison whatever and whoever did not "actually happen." It looks like a watershed: either much more will have to be dumped, or a return to a crude fundamentalism is in the works. Either way the Catholic Church is once more banking on Western man's visceral reluctance to stomach ahistorical myth.

JAAN PUHVEL

Professor of Indo-European Studies University of California Los Angeles

Sir: Fie on you! St. Patrick is alive and well in the breasts of all his faithful. Beware! What he did to the snakes, he can do to you too.

PATRICIA LEE COHILL Akron

Sir: It seems strange that the church should make the feasts of the patrons of Uganda and Japan mandatory while making optional the feast of the Irish patron, St. Patrick.

This insult, however, shall not go unavenged. I have information to the effect that within the month, the IRA will launch a fleet to the mouth of the Tiber in order to force Vatican City to reconsider the issue.

It was bad enough when my brother Christopher, my sister Barbara, and my cousin Philomena were deprived of their patrons, but now they've gone too far.

PATRICK L. QUINN New Haven, Conn.

Freedom Now

Sir: Thank you for the marvelous article on today's exciting fashions ["The Way of All Flesh," May 16]. The selections photographed were wonderful. The hang-ups are gone, along with all the rigid seams and the hard, manly construction.

Today's clothing screams femininity. I must say it's about time. The conventional woman is anything but a woman.

ELIZABETH ELLSESSOR Rochester

Sir: Mr. Brody's disdain for overendowed women distresses and puzzles me. As one who "bounces along" quite comfortably, I have yet to meet the man who finds my "flippity-flop" unappetizing.

CAROL KRUGMAN Towson, Md.

Sir: Being a lover of the antiquities, particularly when set off by beauteous young damsels, I was fascinated by the color pictures showing les girls demonstrating the benefits of see-through and topless fashions against classical columns of ancient Crete and Rhodes.

While my Middle Minoan III is a little hazy, I am pretty sure that the inscriptions appearing on one of the walls translate as follows:

There was a young princess from Crete Whose gown stretched right down to

her feet.

But her bosom was bare, Which the yokels thought fair, But the King thought a bit indisCrete. BILL WILKES Riverside, Calif.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.