Letters: Aug. 26, 1966

• Share

Talk About the Tower

Sir: It's not too difficult to understand why there are so many disturbed people like Charles Whitman [Aug. 12] in your technological society.

Education is geared to absorbing facts. Values are based on money, power and status. Life is ruthlessly competitive, yet morals rest on a Protestant puritanism demanding emotional restraint. Work and pleasure are largely directed by machines, and children are put into communication with machines too early, often as a substitute for human relationship. They may learn faster, but do they experience and feel more?

As for the American cult of the "mother" . . . ugh! No wonder some scientists seriously consider automatic incubators for future generations.

MRS. J. MARAIS Paris

Sir: When in doubt about personal motivation and/or lacking common sense, let us hastily draw our conclusions from the gospel according to Freud and rap "Mom" on the knuckles again.

Because Charles Whitman was male, the major motivation behind his psychosis is said to have involved his mother. Yet it wasn't his mother who trained him to handle guns as soon as he was old enough to hold them; it wasn't his mother who beat his father; it wasn't his mother who is described as authoritarian; it wasn't his mother he hated with passion.

Charlie Brown gets better "analysis" from Lucy, and she only charges a nickel!

D. KAY ROBINSON Arlington, Va.

Sir: The half-outraged, half-defensive statement by self-described "gun fanatic" Charles A. Whitman, father of Mass Murderer Charles J. Whitman, that "I raised my boys to know how to handle guns" echoes the plaintive wail of another father, Willy Loman, protagonist of Death of a Salesman, who in exasperation over his son Biff, cries out: "Why is he stealing? What did I tell him? I never in my life told him anything but decent things." Particularly in light of the Austin tragedy, Whitman's utterance seems just as hollow, counterfeit and pathetic as Willy's.

GEORGE S. DIAMOND Easton, Pa.

Sir: TIME calls Whitman "the perpetrator of the worst mass murder in recent U.S. history." What about the charmer who a few years ago put a bomb in his mother's airborne suitcase and sent 44 innocents to a terrifying death?

FRED WAYNE Los Angeles

Sir: We traveled the breadth of Texas last summer. Granted, everything is big, but when you say Charles Whitman carried a 35-mm. Remington, that isn't big; that's Texas.

RODNEY M. HEISEY, 16 DENNIS M. HEISEY, 13 Lancaster, Pa.

> TIME of course meant .35 calibre.

Sir: Your cover story and a current historical bestseller, Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower, share a leitmotiv from Edgar Allan Poe's "The City in the Sea": While from a proud tower in the town, Death looks gigantically down.

NANCY STALLER Glencoe, Ill.

Sir: The millions of guns privately owned in the U.S., and the care and restraint exercised by their owners, are a tribute to American democracy, for their very existence exemplifies the democratic system: the mutual trust between the citizen and his government.