California, Here It Comes

Sir: After reading your cover story on California living [Nov. 7]. I immediately checked my mailing address and found that I do indeed live in California. But how can I? My hair is not down to my ankles, I only have one wife, and am not the president of a fast-growing conglomerate. My religion does not revolve around the worship of the sun god, and I generally wear clothes. Horrors of all, my waistline is thickening and my hair is thinning, and F don't even care. Matter of fact, I do not even own a surfboard.

LARRY KLINK

Lakeside, Calif.

Sir: California is a colossal put-on. When I was there, I was served New York-cut steak, Long Island duckling, Maryland turkey and Maine lobster. All the long-legged, blue-eyed California girls hailed from Kansas and Texas. I sampled native gefilte fish in the deli opposite the Clift and .--Ugh!--discovered it was made with saltwater fish. This is our future?

JESSE LEVINE

Great Neck, N.Y.

Sir: If it were up to you and all the other goggle-eyed editors, sunblinded by the exuberance of those West Coast Amazons, it would be compulsory for all females between the ages of three and 30 to live in the Land of Sunny Liberation. As an individualistic New Yorker. T can firmly state that no suntanned, bleached-blonde athlete is going to make me follow in her stereotyped, sandy footprints.

KATHY McGOWAN

Long Beach, N.Y.

Sir: You are completely wrong, and under an optical illusion. Legs are no longer here than anywhere north, east or south of our borders. Skirts are shorter.

ERIC ROTHSCHILD

San Francisco

Sir: I'm a real California girl (San Francisco-born), but apparently your reporter didn't notice me because I don't drink orange juice (gives me hives), I don't bake in "the sun (gives me heat rash and sunburn) and I don't surf or ski (dangerous).

Not only that, my legs are short (as is the rest of me), my eyes are clear only on smogless days and my skin is dormant, not exuberant.

My looks are minimum, my restraint is maximum, and my psyche is not restive. But, by God, my body is tranquil--probably because I'm not worn out by being a "California Girl."

CAROL LASTRUCCI

Milan, Italy

Sir: Indeed, the action is here. The new trends--both social and business--are here. Why? It is because a helluva lot of people are hard at work, creating and hustling into motion a better way of life. The lunatic elements make for colorful copy, but they contribute damned little to the dynamics that make this state tick.

And while I am at it. Before you begin the usual literary potshot routine on our Governor Reagan, look at recent financial statements on" the state. You will note that a very wise mind is bringing stability into state government. And from this economic base expanding stability in many other social areas will develop.

JOE MANSFIELD

Thousand Oaks, Calif.

Sir: Next April 14th all of the native Southern Californians are going to engage in a massive field project to move the San Andreas Fault 200 miles east. Whereupon we will expel all non-natives (save my arthritic grandmother) and activate the fault. We will then begin to drift into the Pacific and with the help of our own "high" souls rise toward heaven. We will probably take Vegas with us and leave you Governor Reagan.

STEVE SPEAR

Los Angeles

Conflicts of Interest

Sir: President Nixon has spoken [Nov. 14J with the restraint and wisdom befitting the leader of a free people. All who sincerely want peace rather than increased influence and power for Communism and Socialism in the world should rally in support of our Government. Many public figures are tempted to oppose our present foreign policy, especially in Viet Nam, owing to personal conflicts of interest and political expediency. They have allowed wishful thinking to confuse enemy propaganda with fact.

(THE REV.) JOHN SHADE FRANKLIN

Buzzards Bay, Mass.

Sir: The greatest contribution of the Nixon Administration so far is to the vernacular of the day. It will rank with those of the recent past for great inspirational impact: "the common man." "the man in the street." "Remember Pearl Harbor," "Make the world safe for democracy." and the like. "The Great Silent Majority." Thrilling, isn't it? Just to think, silence; silence at last in this noisy world; silence that has given consent to any and all of the tragic events of history. We should all be "proud to be one of them, the Great Silent Majority, who silently participate in perpetrating yet another tragedy on their fellow man.

L. D. LESH

New Brighton. Minn.

Sir: I love the term "silent majority"; it sounds so much nicer than A Nation of Sheep.

VELMA BULLARD

El Paso

The King's Man

Sir: You called him the King's Taster [Nov. 14]; I call him the King's Jester. For what other earthly reason can this boor be serving than to try to get the opposition to laugh themselves to death?

HOMER F. BRUNEAU

Howell. Mich.

Sir: Blessed be the likes of Spiro Agnew, for they shall restore pride and honor to a disintegrating society. How much more inspiring to listen to the voice of this courageous and patriotic American than to the voices of the liberal breed who act as catalysts for the downfall of America. Surely the deceptive tales of tarnished Ted or the pacifist views of myopic McGovern will do little to revitalize a demoralized people. Let's support our President and our institutions instead of being ashamed to love our flag.

AUDREY A. KELLEJAN

Willingboro, N.J.

Sir: I wonder if you would pass on my suggestion to Bill Adler, author of The Kennedy Wit, and books about the Johnson wit, the Nixon wit. etc. Why not a book containing the hilarious utterances of Vice President Agnew. entitled The Nit Win

BILL STIMSON

Medical Lake, Wash.

What Defeat?

Sir: In "What Withdrawal Would Really Mean" [Oct. 24], you keep referring to "our defeat" in Viet Nam. I can't recall one operation there that was a military defeat for U.S. forces. For years now V.C. and N.V.A. troops have operated with complete freedom from staging areas in Laos, Cambodia and the DMZ, only to be decimated once they fielded forces in R.V.N. Our forces have allowed the enemy to stockpile vast amounts of food, weapons and ordnance, and once feeling the full capacity reached, moved in to capture and destroy these stores. Our forces, according to General Giap, War Minister of North Viet Nam, have exacted a toll of over 600,000 dead N.V.A. troops. The once well-trained and equipped N.V.A. troops have been reduced to a strictly second-rate force, according to senior U.S. commanders.

In s"pite of the lack of complete support from "freedom-loving Americans," our forces in R.V.N. have transformed that country into a viable nation slowly growing to the stage where it can hold its own against the" terrorists from the North. Viet Nam was a defeat for this country's civilians, not for our armed forces.

NORMAN KINGSLEY

Los Angeles

Sir: I am at a loss to understand how George W. Ball can believe that U.S. national interest in Berlin is "fundamental" and in Viet Nam only "marginal" [Nov. 7]. As an isolated and militarily indefensible outpost, West Berlin is of no strategic value; it is indeed a liability, because fears of Soviet retaliatory pressures against the hostage city restrict American freedom of action elsewhere. The decisive argument against abandoning Berlin is simply that to surrender a U.S.-protected non-Communist population to Communist rule would be a morally intolerable betrayal, and that for Washington to let itself be coerced into committing such a betrayal would have devastating consequences on anti-Communist morale.

Except in the eyes of racists, who may consider Asian non-Communists more expendable than European ones, the same moral and psychological considerations apply in Viet Nam. They are reinforced by the fact that South Viet Nam occupies a key strategic position in relation to Southeast Asia--a point I have heard emphasized in Malaysia and Singapore.

KENNETH H. W. HILBORN

Associate Professor of History

University of Western Ontario

London, Ont.

Stirring Up the Conglomerate

Sir: Shades of gay! Apparently only Mother Nature knows for sure the causes of homosexuality [Oct. 311 or what to do about it and, by golly, she's not talking. To her there is no such thing as perfection; otherwise, she'd stop her constant press of evolving. Always experimenting, that bitch!

Religiosity aside, is it not possible that men who burn in their lust one toward another, working that which is unseemly as it were, might very well be only a nefarious experiment on Mother Nature's conglomerate known as the Human Race, and that we creatures really have very little to say about which side of the street we shall follow? Heaven knows, there's not a mother's son among us who woke up one sunshiny morning and suddenly decided, "This is my day for boys!"

I don't wear my homosexuality on my sleeve nor shout it from the rooftops; neither do I give a particular damn who knows I'm gay. If they ask, I tell them. That is part of the secret of becoming well adjusted to the fact. Or after the fact, if you prefer!

E. N. BERNARDO

Baton Rouge, La.

Sir: I'm a heterosexual female, and I've met next to none of the female kind of homosexual people; however, I have worked around the male variety. I found them in general easy to deal with, open to personal problems, understanding about the discrimination against women, liberatingly free of machismo American-style, and otherwise no different from other men--except for the fact that they could deal with a woman as a human being, at least those I knew, rather than as a walking bit of sexual machinery. This is, of course, not innate but very much the result of their deviation from sexual role-playing (which I personally find one big, fat burden and have long since written off, together with anatomical destiny and the rest of the shackling stereotypification).

Let's leave them alone; let's rather j concentrate on the rapists and child molesters and try to find a philosophy where the sexes can get along without that abominable Judaeo-Christian antagonism and guilt, which persecutes the boy-lover who won't hurt me and at the same time creates the sex maniac who will.

DAWN MCQUEEN BATTLE

Tacoma, Wash.

Sir: The real queers are the females of the species, who are constantly demonstrating their hair-raising, stupefying inadequacy and inferiority in all matters not directly concerned with procreation. I have been watching them for two generations now and have come to the conclusion that they are not only a different race but actually a different species, to be left severely alone. Procreation could be performed through computer-controlled sperm banks and artificial insemination with a minimum of physical contact. Then, at long last, the human male would be free to associate with his equals, having learned the art of love-making long ago from his peers in poetry and the arts far beyond the reach of female capacity.

JOSEF HAHN

Porz-Wahn, West Germany

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