That Household Word

Sir: Spiro Agnew is the voice of the silent majority, and, praise God, we are a thoughtful, frank and vibrant people, muted no more.

I feel a sense of selfdiscovery.

J. NICHOLAS KEIL

Los Angeles

Sir: Remember when Truman partisans used to interrupt his speeches with shouts of "Give 'em hell, Harry"?

Now I, as a member of the now not-so-silent majority, am shouting "Sock it to 'em, Spiro!"

WALKER CARLL

Shelbyville, Ind.

Sir: The Vice President's speech assailing one of the most distinguished American statesmen of our time was given free, prime-time national television coverage. Irony of ironies!

Mr. Agnew not only insulted Ambassador Harriman and the television news commentators but also, and with more subtle degradation, the intelligence of the American people. The Vice President's lack of confidence in the ability of his constituency to make discerning and reliable judgments is best matched by their lack of confidence in his ability to do the same.

NATALIE SOLFANELLI

Hyattsville, Md.

Sir: As I understand it. Spiro Agnew has decided that you can't expect objective news coverage from the dollar-minded mass media.

Isn't that just what those impudent snobs of the New Left have been trying to tell us all along?

DICK HEMENWAY

Northford, Conn.

Sir: I seem to have lost my copy of 1984. I hear that there is a man in Washington doing good imitations of Big Brother. Maybe he has it.

A. DROOKER

The Bronx, N.Y.

Sir: Belittle him as you will, he is the only American today who dares to articulate what most of us are thinking. I see nothing wrong with that--unless freedom of speech has become the exclusive property of television news commentators.

HAL GOULD

Washington, D.C.

Sir: Agnew is charged with the responsibility of defending and propagating American ideals in a world of violence and Communist conspiracy. I believe he is doing exactly that, using the only weapon at his command--words. That he uses them so effectively is to his everlasting credit.

ELMER R. SEABERG

Guilford, Conn.

Sir: President Johnson's failure to reconcile candor with public statement came to be known as the credibility gap. Spiro Agnew has developed his own brand of un-believability--the incredibility gap.

SHEILA COLOZZI

Nashville, Tenn.

Sir: When you put Spiro Agnew down too hard you are doing so to an enormous segment of America. What the Vice President is saying is also being said over coffee and back fences by the people who pay taxes and perform the unglamorous and sometimes lowly services.

TONI MEYER

Cincinnati

Sir: You bigoted snots, pig-headed slobs and outraged snobs disgust as much as our V.P. delights. Hope my man Agnew turns his big guns on you despicably biased hacks next.

(MRS.) MARY C. NELSON

Jamesville, Va.

Sir: Many of us could wish that we had a more polished Vice President, but I would rather have to endure a little crudity with integrity than any amount of polish without it.

HOWARD HAYES

Elizabethton, Tenn.

Sir: In the matter of the Vice President's alleged IQ of 135--we demand a recount.

ROBERT E. BURNS

Glendale, N.Y.

Sir: It takes guts to tell off the major networks, something that was long overdue--and we say to them, if the shoe fits, wear it.

O. R. SPERRY

Scottsdale, Ariz.

Sir: I feel as though I'm watching a remake of an old story line. Some of the players are different, and the dialogue is changed. But the plot is clear just the same: those villainous newsmen are kicking Richard Nixon around again.

I hope I'm wrong. I hate to see a grown man cry.

MRS. DARYL G. MITTON

San Diego

Sir: TIME characterized the rise of a man from P.T.A. president to U.S. Vice President within a decade as a display of "small capacity for development." It is obvious that Mr. Agnew's charge of journalistic bias should not be limited to television.

(MRS.) PATRICIA GORTON

Milwaukee

Sir: Agnew is giving an appropriate and timely response to American intellectualism gone amok.

KENNETH L. OSTHUS

Riverdale, N.Y.

Sir: He is the thinking man's nightmare, a bizarre Pied Piper, eliciting and pandering to the dark side of man's nature, augmenting the madness of war hysteria and all the while leading us down the road to violence, ignorance and brutality. MICHAEL STANFIELD San Francisco

Sir: Household word, household pet. Sic 'em, Spiro.

DAVID M. REGAN, M.D.

Neenah, Wis.

Sir: He's telling it like it is to those who have been telling us to tell it like it is--and now they don't like it!

But I like it.

MARVIN E. WATTS

Hingham, Mass.

Sir: It is almost comical how you try so desperately to make the words of Middle America sound dirty. You state: "He speaks with the authentic voice of Americans who are angry and frightened by what has happened to their culture, who view the '60s as a disastrous montage of pornography, crime, assaults on patriotism, flaming ghettos, marijuana and occupied colleges." Well, TIME, you better believe it. This man tells it like we all know it is. I only wish you could do the same.

JOAN MACDOUGALL

New Hyde Park, N.Y.

Sir: Perhaps Nixon's outstanding achievement to date is having chosen Agnew as his running mate. Agnew's "absolute passion for oversimplification" is comforting, since respect for basic American values need not require deep intellectual prowess. If Mr. Agnew stays on the prod, his stature surely will continue to grow.

DALE W. ABBOTT

Houston

Sir: As for anti-intellectualism, the main practitioners today are those people who believe that the best way to effect political or other changes in society is by the massing of bodies in the streets or public buildings.

ROBERT M. CARLSON

Jamestown, N.Y.

Sir: Please expliquez (in one-syllable English words, of course) to us crude, unlettered, simplistic, insensitive, baffled and somewhat defensive middle-class folk from the outback why it is chic to dissent, but merely gauche (or is it camp?) to dissent from dissenters.

We would also like to know 1) why being lower-class is more upper-class than being middleclass, 2) why the New York/Washington axis has a monopoly on right thinking (insofar as it can be distinguished from clean living), 3) why the vox of us benighted populi is more suspect in Spiro Agnew than it was in Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman or Andrew Jackson (each of whom, the way I hear it, was a pretty "common" type, sadly lacking in "politesse").

Also, would you ask Bill Buckley if it is rhetorically possible for all of us klutzes out here to "polarize" in mid-spectrum, or do we have to keep moving to the right?

DORIS H. WILLHITE

Kansas City, Mo.

Sir: Remember, there is only one small step from the silent majority to the silenced majority.

F. BOSCHAN

Lafayette Hill, Pa.

Sir: As a mother who lost her only son, only child, in Viet Nam, Sergeant Walter B. Stevens, U.S.M.C., I happen to agree with the peace movement. I resent very much being categorized as one of "an effete corps of impudent snobs" or an "arrogant punk."

MARY B. DE LA CROIX

San Diego

Sir: I nominate Spiro for membership in the silent majority.

GEORGE MARSDEN Associate Professor of History

Calvin College

Grand Rapids

Sir: Where is the "amusement and disdain" that TIME claims is being displayed by the targets of Vice President Agnew's broadsides? From where the general public sits, there seem to be a lot of nervous Nellies all shook up.

All this furor raises a simple question: What is actually wrong with President Nixon speaking softly and carrying a loud Vice President?

RITA BOSCIA Tuckahoe, N.Y.

Sir: Blake Hampton's Nov. 14 cover of Spiro T. Household is just what we needed for repapering our L.B.J. dartboard.

WARREN PHILLIPS

Pleasantville, N.Y.

Whose Fault?

Sir: I spent 24 cramped hours riding on a bus to Washington, D.C., because I believed in peace [Nov. 21]. I stumbled for four miles on feet I couldn't feel in the cold after midnight. My hands were numb but I kept my candle burning, and I shouted the name of one dead soldier into the glare of the arc lights outside the White House. I cried, because no matter how loudly I shouted his name or how well I sheltered the candle flame, nothing could restore this soldier to life. In the silence at the Capitol, I returned the soldier to his coffin and blew out the candle. Men speeding by in cars shouted "Communists!" and the soldiers behind the windows of the munitions building laughed and mocked my peace sign.

We spoke for peace, but no one seemed to listen. Is it any wonder that some of us drop out of society, disillusioned with a democracy that exists only in name? Whose fault will it be when some of us turn to violence for the next Moratorium?

SUSAN WOLF

Clayton, Mo.

Sir: These so-called peace demonstrators who are shouting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!" should surely be given a chance to go to North Viet Nam. I favor chartering a ship and loading the darlings on, bag and baggage. I'll donate a dollar toward the charter, and I suspect that there would be millions who would be willing to do the same. There is nothing like making for their happiness, and ours too.

MRS. E. J. DALBEY

Portland, Ore,

Sir: It strikes me as ironic--perhaps even appropriate--that driving with headlights on during the day on Nov. 15 meant either that you supported Nixon"s policy or that you were in a funeral procession.

JAMES R. SAKLAD

Boston

Shoo-Fly

Sir: In "What Makes a City Great?" [Nov. 14] you certainly went out of your way to romanticize the vile, the smelly, the noisy, the contaminated and ugly, an accomplishment at which our whole artsy culture is most successful, a culture that is, quite appropriately, centralized in New York City.

Skipping the romance and regarding it more objectively, a "Great City" is simply a great mess that is in love with itself; a great mess composed of a multitude of primitive forms of consciousness who are naturally attracted to gore, egoistic grandeur and gross excitement. It is no wonder that some people feel inclined to put down the hierarchy of this culture, commonly known as the intelligentsia, that sings and swarms around such pomp and pollution like flies around a cowpie.

CHARLES BOLTE

Aspen, Colo.

Sir: All the "great" cities mentioned symbolize selfishness and greed. Once their heydays pass, they produce nostalgia, but admirers shift their love elsewhere.

There is a better test for greatness. Does the city symbolize unselfish spiritual ideas? Does it do so regardless of the activity within? Do men shed tears when they enter it? After 4,000 years, are men still willing to die to hold on to it?

By this test there has been only one great city: Jerusalem.

JOSEPH A. REIF

Ramat-ban, Israel

Sir: New York's so-called greatness is an inadvertent, unforeseen happening of millions of people backing into an increasingly wasteful fight for sheer survival. Yes, New York is exciting, but it is far too hard on the nervous system of the human being to be considered for greatness. Its excitement eventually destroys the finer sensibilities of its inhabitants.

We may gain some perspective from Frank Lloyd Wright's statement: "To some of our people, exaggeration will always mean greatness--because they know no better grandeur."

VERNON D. SWABACK

Scottsdale, Ariz.

Sir: I swear by the fallen Nelson's pillar that the bloody eejit who wrote the Essay on great cities never had a pint in a Dublin pub.

SEAN D'ARCY

Cape Town, South Africa

Without Question or Thanks

Sir: After reading your article, "The New Feminists: Revolt Against 'Sexism' " [Nov. 21], I have this to say to the WITCHES: What next? After taking and taking and taking, since the end of the Victorian era, the fruits of the labors of your enemy without question and often without thanks, you are now going to relieve him of the gift of his manhood? This is not, in my opinion, the action of a real woman or, for that matter, a real person. Everyone must stand up for their rights, but. they don't make asses of themselves while doing it.

Besides, I think women would make perfectly lousy firemen.

(MRS.) ANNE B. O'NEILL

Owings Mills, Md.

Sir: I am a 22-year-old divorcee (no children), and am actively pursuing a career. The idea that women who graduated in the mid-1950s are the only women preferring families and homes is a gross misconception. I have no desire to free myself from men's "tyranny" in exchange for my individual "rights" as a woman. It is my personal belief that one's full potential as a woman is only realized through the respect or love of a man--and not in the company of frustrated women whose only problem is their inability to find that love or respect.

KIM PAYNE

Lawndale, Calif.

Sir: Why not leave "male" and "female" where they belong--as modifiers of the noun human being? Once we realize we don't have to be more of a woman for him to be more of a man, but more of a person so he can be more of a person, our problems will be solved. Also, pornography doesn't degrade woman--it degrades mankind.

SALOMEA L. SCHWEDA

Milwaukee

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