Letters, May 8, 1944

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No Joke

Sirs:

It is no joke when I say that TIME deserves worthy mention for the excellent job it is doing in salvaging the best from the terrestrial, the aquatic, the aerial, and the arboreal boiling pot of world news. TIME also deserves much credit for fostering a democratic exchange of ideas at a period when broad and tolerant ideas apparently seem taboo. But still greater praise should be given TIME for maintaining a sense of humor in reporting matters of utmost concern and gravity, for in times like these God himself must surely possess a sense of humor in order to endure some of the stupid statements and unintelligent actions which are taking place in our world.

LOYDE O. AUKERMAN

Valley Stream, N.Y.

Fala

Sirs:

In TIME (April 17) you published a picture of Fala and his birthday cake. The White House must have a surplus of ration points to be able to bake a cake for a dog. . . . Surely, Fala could have celebrated his birthday with a larger portion of regular dog food. . . .

CARL O. HAUCH

Johnstown, Pa.

Considering his position and public interest therein, Fala can hardly be held accountable for his birthday goings-on. Moreover, he did not eat the cake: after sticking his paws in it and taking a couple of bites, Fala was hustled off by a stern Secret Service man to his kitchen bone.

Bedlam (Cont'd)

Sirs:

I was most interested to read your discussion of New York's mental hospitals [TIME, April 17]. I have wondered how the war had treated them, but find it difficult to believe that they . . . have changed so since I spent some 16 months in one as a patient in 1935-36. . . .

Many of the very things your report finds questionable are not so appalling from the inside. An antique, seemingly haphazard, or unintegrated building dating back into the last century is, if anything, much more therapeutic than brand-new, cold-cut steel and brick. It is the minds, the imaginations, the fancies of those treated that is important, not their carcasses. . . .

What the uninitiated do not know and cannot know is that the world in which the mental patient moves is another world. I have thought that it is most like Through the Looking Glass, where all values are present and effective, but reversed; where a pack of tobacco given a fellow patient at Christmas had, he assured me, with moist eyes, but forgiving, "ruined his life"; where Fischbein is called Trelawny by his friends, Throckmorton, Goldberg, by his. In this world, you never can tell. . . .

The photograph you print is a spine chiller. It chilled mine when I first saw the original, and I went into it as I would into the water at a Maine beach. But everything is relative. ... I saw no "callousness." The contact was always human, if not necessarily "humane. . . ." "Nursing methods are not standardized." Neither are complexes, fixations, psychoses, nor the outside world. .

"Worst fault: lack of outdoor exercise yards." I agree. To me the latter-day equivalent of "the patch of blue the prisoners call the sky" was one of the most difficult things. The overcrowding — even the little of it that I experienced — was bad. . . .