Slide Rule for Survival

Sir: You're beautiful, Mr. Nader [Dec. 12]. We of the Silent Majority and those of the noisy minority need you and your raiders. Aggravation can be found daily in any marketplace from poor merchandise, confusing guarantees and disgruntled sales help. One needs a slide rule to survive in the supermarket.

(MRS.) LEONA ROCKWOOD Hamburg, N.Y.

Sir: I suggest that someone start giving out a Ralph Nader award each year for the person who has caused large corporations the most trouble during the year. We're behind ya, Ralph!

STEFANIE ARGUDO Tampa, Fla.

Sir: I find it quite ironic and terribly sad that Congress must endlessly pass legislation to protect the American consumer from the very people who presume to be the standards by which America's greatness is measured. These ersatz pillars of society apparently find no difficulty in preaching national standards of morality and condemning the younger generation for its cynicism while they themselves are cheating some little old lady out of a few dollars in the marketplace. It is a bitter joke on all of us that big business has in its grasp the power to make America great and to kick her in the behind at the same time.

DAVID KARP San Francisco

Sir: Who says there is no good news any more? Your cover story restores my faith in the democratic process of our society through one man's practice of good citizenship. If that's one meaning of "law and order," I'm all for it.

GABE FONSECA Lynnwood, Wash.

Sir: Ralph Nader seems to know the answer to everything but eating in restaurants. He told the waiter to take his salad away because there was a fly in it. Always ask for and receive a fresh salad --then have the waiter take the first one away. That way you don't get the same salad without the fly.

CHUCK MITCHELL Treasure Island, Fla.

Sir: Your article proves that one man with a goal can accomplish it. Peacefully, even. Black Panthers, student dissidents and anti-pollutionists, take heed.

MICHAEL LEAHY Munnsville, N.Y.

Sir: The supreme irony is that the Corvair in production at the time of the furor (1965 and later) was considered by many mechanical engineers as well as enthusiasts to be the best-handling American sedan available. It is bad enough to live with this know-it-all but to have you glorify him is absolutely nauseating. If he is really serious about safety, why doesn't he work on the worst, most critical, problem--the drinking driver?

WILLIAM C. NICKSON Ann Arbor, Mich.

Sir: Just one point to straighten the record in the cover story on Ralph Nader's crusade for consumers: Each year about 100,000 persons are injured when they walk through ordinary glass, not safety glass.

RUTH K. HOLSTEIN Information Officer

National Commission on Product Safety Washington, D.C.

What Will We Say?

Sir: As I watch the systematic elimination of the leaders of the Black Panther Party [Dec. 12], I wonder how many of us, when it's all over, will say we didn't know what was happening?

SHERRY NARENS Chicago

Sir: The Panthers advocate the violent overthrow of our Government. In their houses are arms and weapons of violence, surely meant to be used on the police or anyone who threatens them. Now law-enforcement officers must explain themselves after defending the public and themselves from what looked like certain death. How ironic that the public is outraged by the behavior of the police instead of that of these maniacal militants.

SANDRA S. EMMES Houston

Sir: The police are in no position "to feel just as violently about the Panthers." The Panthers' position is a political one. The police, however, are an executive agency, empowered only to enforce the will of the majority, the law. As such, they are not entitled to a corporate political view. Allowing the police as a group to take a political position is a direct threat to the freedom of political expression so basic to American democracy.

JAMES ELLIOTT BROWN White Plains, N.Y.

Coloring the Landscape

Sir: Reading Dr. Yablonsky's quotations on hippies [Dec. 12], I couldn't help thinking that here another American minority gets blamed, and doubtless it will have to pay for the criminal actions of some insane individuals. True hippiedom has not only turned out to be a strong and necessary influence upon the stagnant culture of a hypocritical society--with a contribution of color and sensitivity to the black-gray-white American emotional landscape--but also has proved many times that its potential for violence is lower than that of any football crowd.

JOSEF HURBAN Las Vegas

Sir: Charles Manson and his followers represent a concrete example of the antithesis of objective morality, the antithesis of those verities we of the Establishment hold dear. Are we to be blamed if we grow tired of supporting those people who tell us by their appearance that they are most likely to be unemployed, patients in psychiatric wards, or dope addicts? Easy Riders, please note. Your days may be numbered, as I indeed hope they are.

(MRS.) MARION TUCKER Albuquerque

Sir: Congratulations to Dr. Yablonsky for making psychoanalysis a simply defined, black and white, got-all-the-reasons-for-your-hang-ups-baby, science. Everything is much clearer to me now that I know all hippies can kill very "matter-of-factly." By printing the doctor's findings, you have, no doubt, done wonders for the already paranoid Silent Majority.

YVONNE JABLONSKI Chicago

Outcome of the Orders?

Sir: You stated: "It clearly takes greater savagery to kill a defenseless human being when one looks into his face than when one never sees him" [Dec. 5]. I seem to remember that Eichmann and other administrators of the "final solution" had little taste for witnessing the outcome of their executive orders. If only because the authority for acts of state ultimately resides in the broad consent of the people, we must apply to ourselves the same rule that we have with such grave innocence applied to criminals of war in the past. If animals did what we accuse these few of doing, we would destroy them. Yet we hesitate to condemn so quickly. We see in them something of ourselves that we cannot understand and, failing to understand, attempt to deny.

WILLIAM L. ROLLER JR. Montreal

Sir: I wish the people of the world who are speaking put so loudly against the U.S. presence in South Viet Nam and the incident of My Lai could see the "friendly" villagers by day and the fighting hardcore V.C. by night. I wish they could see the women and children setting booby traps and mines. I wish they could see a young child that has had his limbs cut off by V.C. terrorists. I wish they could see the good will many of our troops have spread throughout the countryside of South Viet Nam. I wish they could see the harm done to the fighting morale resulting from peace marches and war demonstrations. I wish they could see that this war, just as any other war, is hell! And until they can see some of these things themselves firsthand, I wish they would keep their damned mouths shut!

MARVIN F. PIXTON III Captain, U.S.M.C. Pensacola, Fla.

Sir: We might wish to recall the thought of Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, "People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel."

(THE REV.) ROBERT PRINS First Christian Reformed Church Wyckoff, N.J.

Light on the Lamps

Sir: Re the two sonnets that you published by Claude McKay ("Outcast" in your remarkable Art Special, "Black Lamps: White Mirrors" [Oct. 3] and "If We Must Die" in the Oct. 24th issue): We are sorry to see that you did not give the customary credit to the publisher.

While we are happy to see that Claude McKay's poetry is getting the attention it deserves, we remind you that the Selected Poems of Claude McKay is in copyright and maintained in print by Bookman Associates, Union Square, New York.

CARL COWL (for the estate of Claude McKay) Brooklyn

Solid Marble

Sir: I am boiling mad! It's a damn shame that the "no Christmas in Marblehead" edict [Dec. 12] was handed down, and it's also too bad that it had to make the national news scene. As a Jewess, I am embarrassed for others of my religion if they were part of the reason that Christmas celebration was banned. I certainly want my own son to learn about and uphold his religion and its traditions and ideals. But boy-oh-boy. I also want him to know that there are others in this world who believe differently than he does.

MRS. STEPHEN H. YOZELL Marblehead, Mass.

Sir: The hamlet of Marblehead is well named.

RAYMOND A. MAXWELL

Cape May. N.J.

Field Guide to Watergate

Sir: "The Warbler of Watergate" [Dec. 5], as any political bird watcher knows, is not a warbler, but a silver-crested lib thrasher (Cranius vacantus) who mates with the now famous red. white and blue American bald eagle (Juris patriotus). The thrasher is often confused with the Communist-eating hawk (Victus eternus), but differs in its diet, for the thrasher thrives on yellow-bellied land snatchers and pink-tufted dissenters (Marxis militanus). The thrasher is a close relative of the Baltimore hatchet wielder (Agnewus intim-idalus) and the rednecked robin (Thur-mondus segregatus), until recently thought to be extinct.

BARBARA SANTEE Tulsa, Okla.

Double Trouble

Sir: Since you mentioned nudity in your review of the movie John and Mary [Dec. 19], I thought you might be interested in the following example of current studio thinking.

Before filming began, I informed the producers that I would not consent to any nude scenes, and was reassured that there would be none. As soon as my work was completed, a double was hired without my consent, and several nude scenes were inserted. I argued and pleaded with the producers for a period of five months, pointing out that these scenes were totally unnecessary and had been added evidently for the sole purpose of conformity with the current trend, but since I had no legal recourse, I lost the argument.

Since the same treatment was accorded my friend Candice Bergen on another film, I suggest it might be beneficial for actresses in the future to contractually insure themselves against this kind of misguided thinking.

MIA FARROW Manhattan

Penmanship

Sir: It was a privilege to know Stephen Potter, captain of all gamesmen [Dec. 12]. But he got me one-down by a mistake. In his Lifemanship (1950), a footnote to the "Yes, but not in the South" variant of the Canterbury Block reads: "I am required to state that World Copyright of this phrase is owned by its brilliant originator, Mr. Pound."

I protested to Potter as soon as the book came out that I had sent him the original in 1947, when his Gamesmanship had been published: an article entitled "Not in the South," which I had written in Punch, May 28, 1941, long before I knew Potter or had heard of gamesmanship or lifemanship. And I told Potter that I would like to meet this usurper, Mr. Pound, whoever he was, behind the fives court.

Potter's letter to me of November 8, 1950, says: "My God, have I got it wrong? I now perceive with horrifying clearness that 1 have ... I will guarantee complete acknowledgment in the second edition. Of course I would meet you behind the fives court myself but for my old heart trouble . . ."

Of course Potter had no "old heart trouble." That was a bit of good gamesmanship. But alas, he never did correct the attribution, and I would so have liked to have my name, even in a footnote, in one of those great books of his. Mr. Pound --pshaw!

RICHARD USBORNE London

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