Letters: Oct. 8, 1965

Water Whipping Sir: Your perfectly TIMEd water cover [Oct. 1] should lead to grass-roots recognition of our nation’s staggering water problem. A thorough whipping is needed, and whip us you did. Your editor punched hard—the message came through raw and unembellished—but even more starkly effective was Robert Vickrey’s cover.

MAC UMSTATTD General Counsel Lower Colorado River Authority Austin, Tex.

Sir: You showed in graphic form the preponderance of ground water resources but did not pursue this in your text. Reuse, desalinization, pollution control, dams and pipelines are all important. But none is so important as public understanding of the availability of ground water in most areas where masses of people live, of its low cost, and of the necessity to use and conserve it.

DURWARD HUMES Committee for Private Water Resource Protection Chicago

Preserving Natural Beauty Sir: In your story on natural beauty [Sept. 17], you mention the junked car problem but fail to mention that a solution has been found. The metal fragmentizer reduces cars to chunks. In Philadelphia, where a fragmentizer will soon become operational, the prediction is that the junked-car problem will be solved within six months.

J. LEONARD LICHTENFELD Philadelphia

Sir: As a scientist, I disagree that the solution to the problem of our deteriorating environment must come from science. Science can help in areas like air and water pollution and waste disposal. But an expanding population needs houses, and houses occupy land formerly devoted to other uses. Though reduction in grazing and food-producing acreage can be partially offset by technological advances, decrease in open spaces cannot. Even our national and state parks cannot remain wilderness areas, for the impact of visitors is changing the character of these areas.

The only solution is population control. We would do well to embark on such a program before we are overwhelmed by numbers.

DONALD F. ANTHROP Berkeley, Calif.

On War

Sir: Many of your readers are grateful for and enriched by your Essays. But in “On War as a Permanent Condition” [Sept. 24], you have reached the nadir of human diplomacy and endeavor.

At all costs, we are to put national interests first, and, hopefully and incidentally, moral interests as well. Do you not, by such conclusions regarding the “moral purpose” of limited war, lay bare the hypocrisy by which we justify our action in time of war? The depth of the evil about us is not a call to retribution but to greatness. Are we not to be called atheists when we believe and act upon the belief that there are gulfs between “right” men and “wrong” men so great that no bridge can be thrown across them? Must we accept war as the price of human dignity and freedom?

What history demands of us is that we share the moral adventure of mankind with a will to create not only security but solidarity among the peoples of the earth. If we are ever to realize the dream of world order of which you write, it will not be by such abject and sterile conclusions as you imply, but by daring to assert, as the presuppositions of that order, the great claims of the U.N. Charter: “To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all.”

The saddest note of the Essay was the “catchall comment,” “Sorry about that.” I am sorry about this Essay.

BISHOP JOHN WESLEY LORD The Methodist Church Washington, B.C.

Sir: TIME’S Essay has booted one of the great hoaxes of our time on a journey that will carry it for another decade at least! The “Norwegian statistician” and the “14,531 wars” calculated by the computer all stem back to the Norman Cousins fantasy that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Dec. 13, 1953. Others who passed along the story as fact include the Military Review, An Cosantoir (the Irish defense journal), the Canadian Army Journal and U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings.

BROWNLEE HAYDON Santa Monica, Calif.

Pope Paul Sir: Your piece on Pope Paul is a witness that the winds of freedom are blowing strong. For a layman to write such a penetrating and yet objective analysis of such a baffling personality is symbolic of the new day.

RUSSELL T. HITT Editor Eternity Philadelphia

Sir: As a seminarian caught in the tide of renewal, and in keeping with the progressive tenets of conscientious freedom, I congratulate you on a job well done. To delve into a subject as intricate as the papacy and produce a masterpiece of objectivity demands recognition.

JOHN VIGILANTI Pearl River, N.Y.

Sir: What a superb profile of the antithetical influences that constitute this enigmatic leader. Like Johnson, the Pope succeeds a charismatic figure; hence accurate perspective on his administration’s impact is clouded. Yet, from your story, one suspects his subtle success. He is the point counterpoint, synthesizing the diversities in the Catholic world.

ELEANORE J. SEGRETTA Troy, N.Y.

Zoology & American Art Sir: Congratulations on your perceptive look at American Art and at that unique ambiguity of American imagination, the fusing of the commonplace with the transcendental [Sept. 24]. But Barker, Canaday, Larkin, and other trained and untrained eyes see a tame fox in the Bingham painting, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri.

JOSEPH G. KNAPP St. Louis

Sir: Could not Bingham distinguish a cat from a bear? Cannot TIME recognize a cat? Perhaps I’m in the wrong field?

HELEN DUNLAP Department of Zoology University of Washington Seattle

> In his exhaustive study of Bingham, John Francis McDermott says it’s a bear cub, “not a cat, not a fox, but plain for all with eyes to see, a bear cub brought down from the mountains.”

Technology or Music

Sir: About “Age of the Patchwork” [Sept. 24] and Glenn Gould’s conclusion that “concerts as they are now known will not outlive the 20th century”: horrors! Is music to be disseminated only through the electronic lab to eliminate human errors that would be noticed only by a few? Since 1940, orchestras have increased from 600 to 1,442; since 1950 there has been an 86% rise in the number of people who play instruments, a 99% rise in instrument ownership. In 1964, the growth rate of amateur musicians was three times that of the population. Long live live music!

DR. EDWIN LIEMOHN Wartburg College Waverly, Iowa

Sir: Long live Callas, Van Cliburn and others like them! Concerts will endure, because music lovers will not relinquish the thrill of live performance. I have not bought prerecorded music for years; I pirate the real thing from the New York Philharmonic and Met broadcasts. My tapes leave much to be desired technically, but the result is music, not artifice.

WILLIAM W. DERBYSHIRE Binghamton, N.Y.

Sir: You dare to bring into the open a fact that has been ignored: the concert is moribund. Why wait to doctor up the sounds until after the performers have played their wrong notes? Composing on electronic instruments, I communicate directly with my listeners, writing for the hi-fi in their living rooms, not for a concert hall designed for dead composers!

IVOR DARREG Los Angeles El Cordobés

Sir: Your story on El Cordobés [Sept. 24] was well written and brought out many facts about the life of Manuel Benítez and his explosive effect on the bullfight world. His imitators are only that—second-rate copies of the real thing.

LYN A. SHERWOOD Editor Clarin Long Beach, Calif.

Sir: The whole of El Cordobés’ August marathon isn’t worth one single bull fought and killed by the real artists of the profession today: Antonio Bienvenida, Antonio Ordóñez, El Viti and Paco Camino. El Cordobés titillates only the ignorant.

ELEANOR WOLLNER MCCLUSKEY Alton, Ill.

Sir: Was it coincidence that that pathetic picture of a stabbed bull appeared in the issue with the Pope on the cover? If they want to accomplish something for God, let them outlaw bullfighting in Catholic Spain.

(THE REV.) JOHN STANTON East Dennis, Mass.

At the Command Sir: In your story on industrial smells, you sprayed page 89 [Sept. 24] with laughing gas. Thank you for a moment of fun and of serious thought. I wonder how many other morons (pardon, no such animal as a moronic TIME subscriber, just humorous intellectuals) obeyed your command to smell the paper and ink.

(MRS.) B. BAUER Santa Maria, Calif.

TV Tally Sir: As a college freshman, I thank the TV networks for offering nothing in the way of good programming [Sept. 24] to distract me from study.

CRIS ROMAN Bay City, Mich.

Sir: You say that My Mother the Car is on CBS; actually it is aired over NBC.

GARY BLAIR Van Nuys, Calif.

Sir: I think the article about My Mother the Car is horrible. I think it is one of the best programs on TV.

LARRY FELDMAN (aged 10) Yeadon, Pa.

The British Economy

Sir: Back at Harvard Business School from London, I appreciate your article [Aug. 27] on the British economy. The problem is clearly defined as maintaining domestic growth without jeopardizing the pound internationally. The article correctly recognized that better utilization of existing labor and capital was the place to begin. Your latest article [Sept. 24] pinpoints an even greater difficulty: how to implement the plan. Preoccupying us in our not-so-insulated academic environment is this question of “how.” Do you employ a Harvard professor to write these articles?

JAN THOMAS HYDE Cambridge, Mass.

> No.

Dutiful Dropouts

Sir: Is devotion to duty as exemplified by Schlesinger et al. [Sept. 24] their answer to the challenge, “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country”? Was the New Frontier run by men bent on self-seeking ambition? A few “Frontiersmen” are building a poor monument to one of America’s greatest idealists, J.F.K.

GEORGE V. STRONG Ithaca, N.Y.

Overvalued Stamps

Sir: Trading stamp distributors [Sept. 17] should know that people are disgusted at finding redemption-center items generally overpriced. Why should you pay $25 in stamps for something that discount stores and some large department stores carry at $12 to $15.

B. H. GARFIELD Haddonfield, N.J.

Front-Wheel Drive

Sir: TIME is quite correct [Oct. 1] in naming the front-wheel-drive Olds Toronado “Detroit’s most impressive innovation,” but it is not true that “small European cars such as Renault and Peugeot have long had front-wheel drive.” Peugeot did not introduce its front-wheel drive until 1965; the Renault R-4 has been made since 1961 but not imported to the U.S. Longtime front-wheel-drive producers include Citroën, DKW and SAAB. The world’s largest producer of front-wheel-drive vehicles is the British Motor Corp.

G. W. WHITEHEAD Executive Vice President British Motor Corp./Hambro Inc. Ridgefield, NJ.

Reverse Pavlov

Sir: Any first-year psychology student knows that you prompt excellence when the reward follows the desired behavior instead of preceding it. Inflated bonuses violate this principle. Huarte and Namath [Sept. 17] have unfortunately been robbed of their incentive and actually encouraged to feed on unearned paychecks rather than earned victories.

RONALD H. ROTTSCHAFER Oak Brook, Ill.