Letters: Jul. 4, 1969

Startling Discovery

Sir: I read with great interest the startling discovery of the June graduates [June 13] that the world contains war, poverty, disease and hatred between races, and thus is not a fit receptacle for either them or Miss Mills' prospective babies. We are all much indebted to them for their shrewd observations and also for their forthright response to this situation —sulking, whining to their parents and destroying their universities.

JOSEPH GOLDBERG Peace Corps Volunteer Perak, Malaysia

Sir: It's too bad that state legislators can't pass effective social legislation as quickly as they pass laws to curb college and university rebels. I suppose it's cheaper and simpler to hire extra police to enforce the new laws than it is to reform the colleges and universities and make them more acceptable to the students. Unfortunately, the moderate student seeking legitimate change will suffer, and those of the extreme right and the New Left will delight in the continuing erosion of genuine democracy in this nation.

ANTHONY PEDERSON Waterville, Iowa

Let's Face It

Sir: You say "No one knows for sure whether they [the South Vietnamese] will be able to maintain the present military balance as U.S. troops are withdrawn," and that the "South Vietnamese are improving" [June 20]. Improving! Do you realize that we sent advisers there in 1950 to improve these people? Nineteen years. Man, that's one generation. If they haven't improved enough by now to cope with their military problems, let's face it, they never will. Let's give them a chance to try. North Viet Nam has the will —let's see if the South Vietnamese can get some get-up-and-go.

MARY EVADENE MALONE Bel Air, Md.

Hex on Sex

Sir: Wilfrid Sheed rarely nods (a fact that enables him to keep a remarkably long ash on his cigars), and I was therefore astonished to encounter a gross historical error in his essay on the Irish [June 20]. He asserts that the small Irish farmer could not even think about sex after 1662. What nonsense! The fact is that my great-grandfather Andrew Bowen, who was born in 1732, was a small Irish farmer (three inches taller than Keats) and thought about sex all the time. He thought about it with the kine in the byre, with the peat in the bog and with the kelp on the strand; and sometimes at night he would rouse himself on his pallet with a dreadful groan, exclaiming, "Oh, I am thinking about sex again!" This was so painful to his mother and father and three living grandparents, who slept like spoons in the big bed beside and slightly above his pallet, that they arranged for him to be shipped to the colonies. He was then approaching 40. He married here and, like most Irish-Americans down to the present day, never thought about sex again.

BRENDAN GILL Manhattan