Israel Stands Alone

Sir / As the events in Austria and those of Saturday, Oct. 6, clearly show, for the Jew there are no allies. We stand alone.

SARA PTASCHNIK

New York City

Sir / There can be no surrender or compromise with Arab oil. We cannot, dare not, become an Arab lackey licking the oil off their feet.

The security of a strong Israel is vital to our own security and way of life. We must have the clear vision and courage to understand this fact and pursue it.

HERMAN SINNET

New York City

Sir / How easy it is to submit to blackmail when you give away the rights of other people! I nominate Bruno Kreisky for Poltroon of the Year.

CHARLES JEFFERSON

San Antonio

Sir / It took just two Arabs to make Austria surrender.

Let us all cheer the valor and glory of this courageous little country!

JOSEPH R. ABRAHAMSON, M.D.

La Jolla, Calif.

Outdoor Pruitt-lgoes

Sir / In your special section, "The Land Boom" [Oct. 1], you show the usual suffocating arrogance of land planning's tyrannical advocates who decide what is good for the rest of us.

Cluster housing should not be the rule. It makes a rural slum, bringing the evils of noise and crowding. Man needs space, privacy, a territory. All that open space is no one's land, and so it goes to hell and is wasted. Meantime, back at the cluster, no one has anything worth a dime--no place for pets or horses or a garden, no fence, nothing but a fancy, outdoor Pruitt-Igoe.

The only reason to buy land is to keep your neighbor and his noise and nose at a distance, and to keep you off his back in turn. Better ten people with an acre each than ten people sharing ten acres. I would not give you cave-dwelling slaves in New York 5-c- for the best cluster house ever built. It is a developmental inferno.

RITA ATKINS

Professor

Shimer College

Mount Carroll, Ill.

Sir / One begins to appreciate that Henry George was quite right--a hundred years ago--in advocating a 100% tax on profits on land transactions.

EUGENE V. KOSSO

Reno

Sir / In justifiably lambasting unscrupulous developers, you failed to point out that many organizations are approaching the problems with genuine attention to environmental and ecological factors.

You completely negate any good intentions for those who seek to preserve local control of growth. It is totally unrealistic to expect the same limitations that must be placed on areas of large populations to be applicable to smaller communities. Contrary to your insinuations, those of us who are active in local planning are not all bigots or insensitive profiteers. In fact, it is often the socially aware developer who spearheads local planning efforts in a sincere desire to see that our natural resources are protected.

ROBERT T. COLGAN

Executive Vice President

Colorado Land & Cattle Company

Durango, Colo.

Sir / I did something of a double take on reading that "land, as a physical quantity, seems almost changeless, altering shape only after aeons."

Not quite! To those of us in South Dakota and other Dust Bowl states in the 1930s, the land changed in one helluva hurry, departing in big clouds of dust that stripped off the thin layer that produced our living. When land left, the people went too, and it didn't take aeons to happen either.

CAROLYN JOHNSTON

Washington, D.C.

Sir / I must add to your mention of black flies on Moosehead Lake in Maine.

The average black fly measures 5 ft. long and 3 ft. wide. It has a wingspan of 7 ft. They usually travel in swarms of 800 or more, summer and winter, day and night, throughout the state. Needless to say, they are extremely vicious--and poisonous. THINK OREGON.

PATRICK C. DOWLING

Editor

Maine Catalog

Portland, Me.

Bored with Watergate?

Sir / Your article "Who's Bored with Watergate?" [Oct. 8] accurately expresses my feelings. After hearing such a recital of dirty tricks, I certainly sense a powerful pressure being exerted on the press and TV to make Watergate "out of fashion." If the people of our country are really bored by Watergate, I feel they deserve Watergate and will get more of the same in the future.

(MRS.) DOROTHY B. KENNEDY

Portola Valley, Calif.

Sir / To those who say they are tired of Watergate, I would ask "Are you also tired of your freedom?"

MAX FLEISHMAN

Glendale, Calif.

Sir / Despite TIME, I shall reserve my right to be bored by anything at any time I damn well please.

G.T. JOHNSON

Birmingham, Mich.

The Buzzards and the Tiger

Sir / The Watergate hearings have reminded me of a flock of buzzards attacking a sick and wounded deer. But that same flock faced a strong and healthy tiger in Pat Buchanan [Oct. 8].

W.D. GARRISON

Muskegon, Mich.

Sir / Pat Buchanan's defense of dirty tricks indicates contemptuous arrogance. Decency cannot be diluted by distorting ethics.

RUTH N. ROOCK

Dayton

In Defense of Football

Sir / Stefan Kanfer covers a great deal of ground in his Essay on TV football [Oct. 8], but, as far as I am concerned, he has missed the basic reason for the appeal of this phenomenon: the appreciation of skill, which is the greatest passive joy of intellectual existence.

It is a skill in itself, and when developed to the point where one can differentiate the great from the mediocre, it gives great pleasure.

SHERMAN W. ATWELL

Brookline, Mass.

Sir / Your Essay on sport overlooks what is probably the primary factor in sport's appeal to the spectator: sport celebrates man's accomplishments.

When we read a newspaper, most of what we see is concerned with man's failures. That is not so in the comics or on the sports pages.

EARL T. JOHNSON

Grants Pass, Ore.

Sir / So what's wrong with a sport that is essentially warring? All competition is a war to win--whether among nations or among teams or between individuals.

Far better to work off aggression (which is intrinsic in man, whether we like it or not) on the gridiron or in the bull ring or on the race track or at the chess table than on a battlefield.

JEANNE MINGE

New Orleans

Is Architecture Sculpture?

Sir / In his story on Sydney's Opera House [Oct. 8], Robert Hughes is confused when he deprecates street architecture as "fac,ade" architecture, and celebrates the freestanding site for architecture as "sculpture." Architecture is not sculpture. People do not live and die in sculpture. This sort of craven search for show-off building sites and crudely gestural architecture-as-sculpture is one of the major failures of modernist architecture, particularly of the so-called Expressionists, of which Jo/rn Utzon is a very late bloomer.

DONALD HOFFMANN

Kansas City, Mo.

Sir / In our mundane, functional age, Utzon has provided Australia and the world with a symbol of grandeur and a shrine of fantasy. The Sydney Opera is both myth and monument.

WALLACE VAN ZYL

Muncie, Ind.

Battles of Flesh and Spirit

Sir / "Paul Tillich, Lover" [Oct. 8] served to rattle and shake my personal theology. Certainly the Lord advocated that his followers "love one another," but, according to Tillich's wife Hannah, Paul didn't call a halt to his burning passion for the fair sex.

But, after all, it was Mr. Tillich who staunchly wrote: "Protestantism is a continuous history of the breaking of images." He may have shattered my theological images, but my faith remains intact in those wonderful saints who, in spite of the battles of flesh and spirit, led lives that offered the word of hope and good cheer.

RON BLEWETT

Chardon, Ohio

The Gullibles

Sir / So Sidney Hook and the University Centers for Rational Alternatives want to set up a required program of undergraduate studies to save liberal education and to help establish "a permanent defense against gullibility" [Oct. 8].

One of the larger examples of gullibility in our society is putting up good money to pay teachers to require students to take courses to get a degree to get a job that doesn't require a college education.

RICHARD D. ERLICH

Oxford, Ohio

Sir / Admittedly, American education is in trouble. But to say this is due to a lack of a liberal arts education is absurd. Our society desperately needs specialists.

It has been my experience that the most gullible and naive people are liberal arts majors who know little and yet have the incredible gall to call themselves educated. Let me assure you that to say that our educational system needs a more extensive system of liberal arts is analogous to saying that a sinking ship needs more water.

ED GRIFFITH

Durango, Colo.

Humane Death

Sir / I am fascinated by Governor Reagan's suggestion [Oct. 8] that we search for more humane methods of capital punishment, i.e. "the simple shot or tranquilizer."

Governor Reagan's statement is really a challenge to our technology to find methods of putting condemned persons away so that we, the living, do not vicariously feel their pain. To take the life of a human who is unwilling to give it is inhumane.

STEPHEN B. CAPLIN

Indianapolis

Over the Wall

Sir / I was one of those fortunate enough to gain my freedom from the "socialist paradise" beyond the wall. In 1969 I left behind a life full of fear, oppression and shades of gray, convinced that freedom was worth any price. Your article on East Germany [Oct. 1] served to strengthen my deep gratitude and appreciation for freedom.

HELFRIED FLACKE

Wiesbaden, West Germany

Sir / I am one of the lucky 2,700,000 from Leipzig who got out before the wall was built. But still I am very proud of these humble, hard-working people who are making the best of the colorless, dreary life in which they are condemned to live. If I were still living in East Germany today, I probably would be trying, with typical German efficiency and persistence, to make the system work, even if I hated it.

MARIA TUERK

East Detroit, Mich.

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