Letters: Sep. 20, 1999

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After tucking my child into bed, I opened my TIME to the article on the earthquake in Turkey and saw the photograph of Emine Kacar, trapped in the ruins of her building [WORLD, Aug. 30]. I wept for this woman, her children dead, a child's small body lying beneath her own. I had read the headlines and kept pace with the daily death-toll updates, but the scale of human suffering did not touch me until I connected with this victim. You say in your article that "it is the individual snapshots that bring Turkey's tragedy home." It certainly came home to me, and I ache for the loss. VICKI ERICKSON Raleigh, N.C.

Your reporting and photos indeed brought home a "tragedy beyond comprehension." But your coverage left me wanting more--accounts of the doctors who left their practices at a moment's notice to provide aid, information on the search-and-rescue specialists called into action and an update on the Red Cross's efforts to collect money on the home front to support our neighbors to the East. We wealthy Americans can't even imagine what a loss of life and homes of this magnitude would feel like. We need you, TIME, to bridge the humanity gap that exits between affluent America and our less fortunate neighbors. PAUL FALCONE Valencia, Calif.

THE DEBATE OVER HOROWITZ

In "A Real, Live Bigot," your columnist Jack E. White writes as though he has been granted a special license to hurl hateful epithets that stigmatize good people for life [DIVIDING LINE, Aug. 30]. Indeed, this piece has set us all on a perilous course. Who will have the courage to enter this vital debate? Is a new version of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror upon us--with reputations, rather than heads, falling? D.L. COBURN Dallas

In Webster's Dictionary a bigot is defined as "a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices." Given that definition, White is correct, even polite, when he refers to David Horowitz as a bigot. Anyone who examines Horowitz's writings over the years will discover a perverse obsession with black people, an obsession for which he has been paid handsomely by right-wingers whose problems with blacks are probably more profound than his. Bashing black people is a lucrative 19th century industry that has survived into the 20th. ISHMAEL REED, PUBLISHER Konch Magazine www.ishmaelreedpub.com Oakland, Calif.

I respect the astute and rigorously unsentimental David Horowitz as one of America's most original and courageous political analysts. He has the true 1960s spirit: audacious, irreverent, yet passionately engaged and committed to social change. I regard him as an important contemporary thinker who is determined to shatter partisan stereotypes and defy censorship wherever it occurs--notably, in this case, in the area of discourse on race, which is befogged with sanctimony and hypocrisy. As a scholar who regularly surveys archival material, I think that a century from now, cultural historians will find David Horowitz's spiritual and political odyssey paradigmatic for our time. CAMILLE PAGLIA PROFESSOR OF HUMANITIES University of the Arts Philadelphia