The Blackout

Sir: If you look at certain pictures of blacked-out New York City, you can see very plainly, hovering over the city, a flying saucer. Obviously the power failure [Nov. 19] was only a preliminary to a massive invasion by alien forces bent on destroying the human race. You must be relieved to know it wasn't Russian sabotage at all.

HAROLD F. WHITNEY Boston

Sir: Your story, which struck me as superficial, omitted mention of the fact that the telephones were working. No doubt you are aware that telephones are powered by electricity--and Mother Bell was prepared. Similar efforts were made successfully by the radio stations. Other public utilities were found sadly wanting, including the bus system and the fraternity of New York taxi drivers, who were either unwilling to take fares or overcharged them; they deserve public contempt.

ERIC HOLZER New York

Sir: The "brown-robed Franciscan friar" who was directing traffic was no amateur. Before joining the order, Brother Patrick O'Leary, O.F.M. was for seven years one of "New York's finest."

FR. PATRICK ADAMS, O.F.M. St. Francis Monastery New York City

On Death

Sir: I congratulate you on your perceptive and timely Essay "On Death as a Constant Companion" [Nov. 12]. You show that the answer of religion to doubts about death does not satisfy modern man, and that philosophy and science have done no better. I remind you of parapsychology, or psychical research, which attempts the scientific study of phenomena not yet understood by physical principles. Most research done in this field deals with extrasensory perception, but there are also investigators, like me, who are concerned with studies that may throw light on whether or not human personality or some aspect of it survives bodily death. Whether or not the facts allow us to say that we have evidence for survival after death, as held for instance by Psychologist Gardner Murphy, they do indicate that the problem of survival is open to scientific inquiry.

W. G. ROLL Psychical Research Foundation, Inc. Durham, N.C.

Sir: I was born in Shanghai of missionary parents. As a boy I became interested in heaven as depicted in Revelations. I saw nothing jolly in harping and singing praises forever and ever. But I knew God as my friend and was sure He would provide something better and funnier for small folks to do--like sliding down waterfalls in the River of Life or letting my tree-climbing sister climb the Tree of Life. Now I am 77. My hope each evening is that I may have the bliss of falling forever into a deep, dreamless sleep. To me there is no lure in any imaginable sort of "eternal life." The greatest happiness I have ever enjoyed would pall into unspeakable boredom in vastly less than fourscore years, let alone "eternity."

J. ADDISON SMITH Seattle

Sir: Even in an age when oversimplification often passes for understanding, your shallow condensation of Albert Camus and existentialism is remarkable. TIME has summarily dismissed one of the great yea-sayers of the 20th century.

LEROY MILLER MARC SHELL DAVID C. T. SHEN Stanford, Calif.

Sir: Santayana summed it up: "There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval."

TERTIUS CHANDLER Goeteborg, Sweden

Pacifists, Vietniks et al.

Sir: About TIME'S story on my burning my draft card [Nov. 5]: I am quoted as saying "Destruction of a draft card poses no greater threat to national security than the destruction of a bubble-gum card." Those are not my words: they are from an American Civil Liberties Union release. And you are wrong to consider draft-card burning "a post-adolescent craze" like panty raids and telephone-booth packing. I can't deny that there is shallowness in some dissent, but it is wrong to believe that a majority of the dissenters are merely exhibitionistic. There is no threat to peace or security from me or from other protesters; the danger lies in blindness to the fact that we have something to say. DAVID MILLER Onondaga County Penitentiary Jamesville, N.Y.

Sir: I have never written a letter to an editor in all my 40-odd years, but your Nov. 5 issue drove me to it. Seeing the photographs of our soldiers in Viet Nam and on the facing page the picture of the yellow-bellied draft-card burner is more than a mother with a 19-year-old son waiting his turn to serve his country can take.

MRS. B. MADER Troy, N.Y.

Sir: Although I have no wish to condemn the Quakers and other pacifist groups, I think it should be pointed out that their right not to fight and to worship freely here in safety has been guaranteed them by religious boys and girls of other faiths who have fought and died for our country.

(MRS.) KATHRYN R. REEVES Fullerton, Calif.

Sir: As a fellow student and friend of Norman Morrison in Edinburgh, I look upon his self-cremation as a tragedy. There is no theological or moral apologia for such an act, no matter how noble the cause. The only way to accept and understand it is to realize that man is a confusion of beliefs and psychodynamics and is ever in need of the grace and goodness of God.

(THE REV.) JOHN H. VALK Auburn, N.Y.

The Crisis in Rhodesia

Sir: As the granddaughter of a Rhodesian pioneer, I thank you for your well-balanced cover story on Rhodesia [Nov. 5]. In view of the nonsense written about Southern Africa in most of the overseas press, this article came as a welcome relief. Now that U.D.I, is an accomplished fact, I am very proud of my Rhodesian heritage. No doubt Americans felt the same when they were called traitors in 1776. But reaction from the rest of the world has us baffled out here. Rhodesia is peaceful and prosperous; why try to bring about another Congo? Apparently, no one will rest until Rhodesia has been brought to its knees.

(MRS.) A. N. JANDRELL Cape Town, S. Africa

Election Issues

Sir: Although I consider myself a Democrat, I applaud the victory of Republican John Lindsay of New York [Nov. 12] as a tremendous victory for good, responsible government. We would be negligent indeed if we did not also applaud the citizens of New York. For the most part, they ignored considerations of party, religion, race, etc. that are all too often important in our elections. The people of our nation are slowly beginning to realize that such considerations are no longer the key issues on this rapidly shrinking planet. The people held out their hand for help, and John Lindsay took it.

GEORGE GRIFFITH Deerfield, Ill.

Sir: Congratulations for the new dimension you have added to political reporting. J.V.I. is not only prettier, he is purer, smoother and gooder than anything else around. Thank you, Modern Screen.

M. FUJIMOTO New York City

A Bead or Two of Sweat

Sir: Mr. Chin was not the first "human bomb" to be operated on successfully by American combat surgeons [Nov. 12]. During the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942, Navy Fire Controlman Allen L. Gordon, aboard the battleship South Dakota, was struck by a 20 mm. antiaircraft shell that pierced his intestines and lodged near his left hip. He was taken to a makeshift field hospital on a South Pacific island, where the live shell was removed by three Navy doctors (of whom I was one), working around a chin-high screen of armor plate.

H. W. JACOX, M.D. The Presbyterian Hospital New York City

Sir: As a Red Cross orderly in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, I was present when a badly frightened soldier was admitted to an army hospital with an eight-inch unexploded mortar shell partially embedded in his shoulder. Surgeons and demolition experts deliberated on the advisability of deactivating the shell before attempting surgical removal. In the meantime, the victim decided to take matters into his own hands, forcibly wrenched the shell from his shoulder. He tried to hand it to one of the experts, but quite suddenly he was all alone in the room. Eventually the shell was deactivated, and the soldier made a complete recovery. The rest of us have never completely recovered, however.

JOSE C. MONTERO, M.D. Stanford University School of Medicine Palo Alto, Calif.

Sir: In 1944, when I commanded the 29th Ordnance Bomb Disposal Squad near Portsmouth, England, I was called to a U.S. Army hospital and asked to identify an object silhouetted on X-ray plates. It was a 20-mm. shell, embedded in the chest of an American merchant seaman who had been on the deck of his ship at Omaha Beach, June 6. A surgeon cut the man open, grasped the shell with forceps and put it into my hands. There were no sandbags, though I did observe a bead or two of sweat.

THOMAS A. NELSON JR. University of Minnesota Minneapolis

The Nurse Anesthetist

Sir: As President of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, I would like to compliment you on an excellent, informative story on anesthesiology [Nov. 5]. One statement requires clarification: "Nearly gone is the nurse-technician who dates back to the early days of ether and chloroform." This implies that nurse anesthetists today only rarely administer anesthetics. The reverse is true. About 40% of the anesthesias are given by members of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, about 45% by certified registered nurse anesthetists, and the remainder by other physicians, nurses or technicians.

JOHN J. BONICA, M.D. Seattle

How the Soviets Live

Sir: The accomplishments of the Soviet economy mentioned by Soviet Letter Writer Ivan Romanov [Nov. 12] are impressive; yet it might be relevant to look also at some of the statistics that most closely affect the Soviet citizen's welfare. Definitive figures will become available only when the central statistical administration publishes its 1965 report next January, but it is possible to make the following estimates on the basis of the official nine-month report and recent speeches by Kosygin, Polyansky and I. T. Novikov. Within the overall volume of industrial production, the targets for producer goods will easily be overfulfilled, while those for consumer goods (one quarter of the total) will not be met. The gross agricultural product will have grown by 7% instead of the 70% envisaged. The minimum wage was to have been increased from 27 to 35 rubles a month to 50 to 60 rubles a month; instead it has only recently been raised to 40 to 45 rubles a month ($44.40 to $50). Most serious for the Soviets, for whom cramped accommodation (less than 8 sq. meters of living space per capita is the urban average) and lack of privacy are the greatest physical hardships, is the fact that the seven-year plan's target for urban residential construction (650 to 660 million sq. meters) will be underfulfilled by at least 14%.

KEITH BUSH Economist Munich, Germany

The Ruby Trial

Sir: Your story on my book, The Trial of Jack Ruby [Nov. 5], was the most accurate and fair summary of the book yet published. I will no longer join those who say that TIME is accurate on everything I don't know about, but terrible on the things I do know.

JOHN KAPLAN Professor of Law Stanford University Stanford, Calif.

Stamps for Toys

Sir: So the good ladies of the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan are saving Green Stamps for an airplane for their noble, semiliterate leader [Nov. 12]. That is sickening, particularly to us in Taos, because we collect trading stamps too--for Christmas toys for children of poverty-stricken families. Our stamps are collected by people of three groups (Spanish-American, Indian, Anglo) for children of three groups in an area where these people have lived together cooperatively for years.

MRS. WARREN N. WARHOL Taos, N. Mex.

A Shepherd's Cap Is Not a Yarmulka

Sir: You describe my novel, The Stronghold, as "mawkishly pro-Semitic" [Oct. 8]. I have heard many indignant comments from people who, as I did, found your review antiSemitic, particularly when combined with the photo you used. The skullcap in the picture is not a yarmulka; it is a Yugoslav shepherd's cap.

MEYER LEVIN New Rochelle, N.Y.

>TIME is not antiSemitic; it is only anti-mawkish.

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