Letters to the Editors

I read with interest William Langewiesche's "The Crash of EgyptAir 990" (November Atlantic) and concluded that the catastrophe might have been the opening salvo in Osama bin Ladin's effort to destabilize the West and in particular the United States. Although such a scenario appeared unlikely in 1999, at the time of the crash, we might easily conclude that the pilot who seized control of the cockpit was rehearsing the action of the hijackers responsible for the September 11 atrocities. Certainly, neither the crew nor the passengers made any effort to prevent the takeover, encouraging bin Ladin and al Qaeda to assume that a programmed hijacking might encounter little or no resistance.

Nelson Marans

Silver Spring, Md.

W hy, if the National Transportation Safety Board's "sole purpose is to investigate accidents and issue safety recommendations," does it not suggest or even insist that cockpit recorders of both voice and flight data be provided with backup electrical power, so that voice and flight data can be recorded continuously, for as long as possible?

Such a feature would prevent the problem cited by William Langewiesche: "because the engines had been cut, all nonessential electrical devices were lost, blacking out ... the recorders, which rely on primary power ..." Such problems have been reported in many accidents but seem entirely avoidable.

John Joss

Los Altos, Calif.

I congratulate you on P. J. O'Rourke's fine exposé of life in Israel under the constant threat of terror ("Zion's Vital Signs," November Atlantic). I was particularly pleased to see O'Rourke's exposure of a piece of history that is almost never noted in the national press: the Arabs agreed to the formation of a Jewish state and even signed a treaty, in 1919, with Chaim Weizmann. Let's hope Secretary of State Colin Powell read that article too. He could use a little lesson in history—and a reality check on the threat that Israel continues to face. It's time that Washington publicly noted Yasir Arafat's true goal, as stated in the Fateh constitution: "Complete liberation of Palestine, and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence."

Alyssa A. Lappen

Brooklyn, N.Y.

P. J. O'Rourke refers to Palestinian youths throwing in the "girly" fashion of countries where soccer is played. What appears to those in Baseball Land to be a girlish throw is in fact the more powerful cricket pitch, although I concede that Soccer Land and Cricket Land overlap considerably. This cricket pitch is more powerful because the lever is longer—the fulcrum is the shoulder, and the arm is kept more or less stiff—than in the elbow-and-wrist throw of a baseball pitcher. It allows the typically greater shoulder musculature of a male (so much for girlishness) to be used to greater advantage. What the baseball pitcher loses in power he gains in control of spin, but the cricket pitch has more raw power, and considerable talent and experience are required to control it.

Marc A. Schindler

Spruce Grove, Alberta

As a member of that extremely small but peaceful group the godless, whose leading light is truth, I must protest P. J. O'Rourke's pinning Hitler's Holocaust on us in his rambling about Israel: "We went to Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem Holocaust Memorial, and saw what the godless get up to."

The religious temperament is always quick to disown the products of its peculiar reward-and-punishment systems when eruptions of rage reveal the underside of its ugly psychologies. McVeigh? Oh, he wasn't a Christian! Osama? Oh, he isn't a Muslim! Hitler? Oh, he wasn't a Christian, even if he did make reference to Jesus in some of his speeches. Stalin? Oh, he wasn't raised Christian. We atheists—who, as far as I can see, are nowhere in the world leading a silly war against any group that does not agree with us—deplore such dishonesty.

George Thomas

Spokane, Wash.

P. J. O'Rourke offers astute insights into Israeli society, but with an outsider's flawed smugness. He makes several flip references to the Passover story in Exodus, and in regard to a kosher sushi restaurant he drops a casual "by the way" quotation ("Leviticus 11:10 says, 'Of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you'"), commenting that "gentiles aren't expected to understand the intricacies of dietary law."

By quoting part of this verse out of context and by twisting its syntax, he makes it sound as if Mosaic law forbids the eating of fish in general (as opposed to non-fin fish, which it does forbid). All one has to do is read the verse in full to get the intended meaning. What's going on here? It might be understandable if O'Rourke made such a blatant mistake on some obscure passage of the Bhagavad Gita, but Jews and fish? Come on. I called the restaurant he referred to and was assured that they didn't use any squid or shellfish or other forbidden ingredients in any of their dishes.

O'Rourke gives the impression of a disinterested realist reporting on the practical side of Zionism, too sophisticated to care one way or the other about the sectarianism and piety in Israel, and yet he bends over backward to slander a perfectly honest observance, by misquoting Scripture in a most casual tone.

Jeffrey K. Jenkins

Kent, Wash.

P. J. O'Rourke replies:

I can understand how Hitler causes sense-of-humor failure, but why does sushi do so? Fish that aren't cooked yet just ain't kosher as far as this Irishman is concerned. If I "fish" around enough in Leviticus, I can find justification for my views.

The main puzzles about Byron York's piece on R. Emmett Tyrrell and The American Spectator ("The Life and Death of The American Spectator," November Atlantic) are his insistence that they were once witty and intelligent and his puzzlement that Tyrrell would never publish anything at all critical of Ronald Reagan. I first encountered Tyrrell and his mag twenty-six years ago, and I understood instantly both that he was right-wing to the point of being literally hysterical and that he was childishly nasty. (Hendrik Hertzberg's description of his "wit" is right on target.) His ultimately self-destructive anti-Clinton jihad was not one bit more irrational than what he had written about every Democrat or liberal he ever encountered.

The magazine wasn't much better. (Odd, for instance, that York never mentions the column Tom Bethell wrote in the magazine throughout its lifetime—in which he declared that the richest American and the poorest one should pay exactly the same amount in taxes, and that the Maryknoll nuns raped and murdered by an El Salvadoran death squad deserved it because they were "bull-dyke socialists.") But then York, as he says, was closely associated with the magazine himself. Like P. J. O'Rourke, who also bailed out after the Spectator's scandals became unconcealable, he simply proves that rats will leave a sinking ship even if they helped to crew it.

Bruce Moomaw

Cameron Park, Calif.

I loved your article on the demise of the Spectator, a magazine that started as a meanspirited and slanderous yellow rag and continued that way. Does any merit attach to an organization that lived only to attack others' ideas and produced nothing of value on its own? The irony of a "conservative" organization's going out of business because it can't handle having money is too delicious.

I must, however, dispute Byron York's comment that the Troopergate story was valuable. It was garbage, which he would know if he researched the subject rather than taking the Spectator's word for it.

Teresa Welby

Clarks Summit, Pa.

I was a classmate of "Bobby" Tyrrell's (Indiana University class of '63) and a member of Dr. James Counselman's Big Ten championship swim team of 1962. Counselman was not inclined to turn down anyone who desired to learn to swim and survived his grueling training discipline. (Doc took his Ph.D. in kinesiology, and he revolutionized the way swimmers train by introducing, for the first time, weight training for swimmers.) All of this is by way of saying that when Bobby (whose persona evolved into "R. Emmett Tyrrell" by some Brobdingnagian stretch of character profiling by "his own self") suggests that he was a "promising" member of the swim team, he is inviting incredulity.

H. Clayton Hebb

Mesa, Ariz.

Byron York should have looked more closely at Bob Tyrrell's claim that he started The American Spectator in 1967 as a lone insurgency against a "hard left" SDS student government at Indiana University. In 1967 IU's student government was controlled by the Tryus Party, which won a landslide victory on a promise to arrange spring-break charter flights to the Bahamas. In the 1960s IU students wore ties or white gloves to dinner and discussed politics mainly at "Great Issues Mock Senates" arranged by the faculty. The SDS chapter had roughly a dozen members, several of them undercover FBI agents.

If The American Spectator rose and fell on Tyrrell's skill at selling his delusions to conservative sponsors, the pattern began in Bloomington, where he concocted his first "arrogant" liberal conspiracy and retailed it to the credulous yokels from New York.

Nick Cullather

Department of History

Indiana University

Bloomington, Ind.

Byron York replies:

For years Bruce Moomaw wrote cranky, sometimes amusing letters to the Spectator, telling us all what wackos we were. It seemed then, as it does now, that it was a magazine he loved to hate, so for his sake I'm sorry it's gone. As for Teresa Welby, the Troopergate story was, as I wrote, flawed. But the central allegation—that Clinton used the troopers to facilitate his extramarital affairs—was accurate, and also a pretty good predictor of what would happen later in the White House. As for H. Clayton Hebb's objection to my calling Tyrrell a "promising" swimmer, I interviewed, but did not use quotations from, Dr. Alan Somers, a friend of Tyrrell's who was a member of the 1960 U.S. Olympic team. Somers told me that Tyrrell was able enough but was outshone by several world-class teammates. Finally, on Nick Cullather's statements about the IU student government: During my research I interviewed, but did not quote, Guy Loftman, who was elected president of the IU student body in the 1967-1968 year. Loftman, who was frequently the target of Tyrrell's barbs, was one of the founders of the local chapter of SDS. In our interview he described the campus as "swinging pretty hard to the left" at the time of his election.

In his November editorial on terrorism Michael Kelly mentions the London blitz and Palestinian terrorism as failures of terrorism to achieve political objectives. This is just one theory that fits the available evidence. Another theory is that some acts of terror, such as the Allied bombing of Cologne, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, or the acts perpetrated by the Irgun (of which Menachem Begin was a member), succeed in their political objectives, whereas others fail. The acts of terror that succeed are redefined by the winners as not being acts of terror.

David Choweller

Riverside, Calif.

I very much enjoyed Mike Kelly's editorial. Some aspects of it, however, gave me pause. Citing another writer, he makes reference to Hitler's and Stalin's inability to cause populations to "suffer a collapse of will and submit to their persecutors." In fact astoundingly huge masses of people did exactly that. History shows that the huge numbers of people who opposed Hitler and Stalin were absolutely neutralized by fear and public slaughter (terrorism). The reigns of terror of these maniacal usurpers did not end until their deaths, and well after the loss of millions of human lives. Hitler and Stalin were wildly successful terrorists. Mao Zedong's success continues to survive him. He terrorized millions of people, including those in remote and humble villages. Educated people were publicly executed, modern women had their heads shaved in public, roads throughout that vast land were filled with bonfires of Western literature and silk clothing, and the families of the educated and successful were mercilessly and publicly destroyed. Teenagers were armed, and the masses were terrified into submission that continues to this day.

Linda Binkley

Saratoga, Calif.

Terrorism, Michael Kelly tells us, "does not cause a people to 'suffer a collapse of will and submit to their persecutors.'" Well, yes and no. Zionist terrorism in the 1940s certainly caused a collapse in Britain's will to shoulder its responsibilities to the indigenous Palestinians. On the other hand, Israeli terrorism, from Deir Yassin to Sabra and Shatila, has equally certainly failed to cause the Palestinians to submit meekly to their fate.

Jeremy Gilling

Sydney, Australia

I read with interest Margaret Talbot's review of Kingdom of Children, concerning the home-schooling movement as embodied in the Christian fundamentalist movement in the United States. ("The New Counterculture," November Atlantic). My sister exemplifies the thesis that home schooling benefits the mother, who otherwise would have no sanctioned outlet for her intelligence and drive within the constraints of the rigid gender roles imposed by this muscular brand of Christianity.

My sister trained as a teacher. Her children are bright, with good manners and lovely, lively spirits. The five-year-old can already read and do his numbers. However, by the end of their twelve-year home-schooling process they will know nothing about geology. They will know nothing about evolution or natural selection, which are the cornerstones of modern biology, from ecology to genetics and gene mapping. They will speak only English. They will have been taught that their way of belief and behavior is the only way, with no exposure to other cultures, other beliefs, except to be told that those ways are wrong. And that includes not only other systems such as Islam and animism but also Catholicism and, indeed, other kinds of Protestantism, which are also anathema to my sister. Those children will know a great deal about the Second Amendment and nothing about the First, which guarantees freedom of, and freedom from, religion. They will be taught that the United States is a Christian, rather than a secular, nation.

Lisa Lombardi

Brisbane, Australia

The myth that the Home School Legal Defense Association battled for "the legal status" that home schoolers enjoy today has been perpetuated in your review of the book Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement. Margaret Talbot should have reviewed some other sources on the legality of home schooling before reporting the HSLDA's propaganda.

The HSLDA has to justify its existence by spreading the falsehood that it "made home schooling legal." In fact many of the laws that it has helped to enact have eroded freedoms formerly enjoyed by all home schoolers. It has achieved this by working with, or acquiescing to, states in placing new restrictions on home schoolers. The HSLDA is trying to make home schooling over into its image of what home schooling should be, and we who do not like that image must resist and set the record straight.

Rachel Kubaryk

Lajas, Puerto Rico

Margaret Talbot presents an incorrect summary of John Holt's work and ideas in her review of the book Kingdom of Children. Holt never regarded children as "superior in every way to adults," nor did he advocate a Rousseauvian pedagogy. In Teach Your Own, Holt wrote, "Children do often seem to me like talented barbarians, who would really like to become civilized. Many free schools, and some kindly and well-meaning parents, have suffered from the notion that there was something wild and precious in children that had to be preserved against the attacks of the world for as long as possible. Once we get free of this idea we will find our lives with children much easier and the children themselves much happier." Holt advocated sharing our adult concerns and experiences with our children as much as we can, not isolating them from adult society, as Rousseau proposed. Further, Holt wrote extensively about the sorts of things children can participate in to help them learn and grow; he didn't envision children's being left alone to "learn their little hearts out."

Patrick Farenga

President, John Holt Associates Inc.

Cambridge, Mass.

Corrections:

In the editing of Gary Giddins's review of The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin (New & Noteworthy, December Atlantic) two errors were introduced: Ira Gershwin was given the forename of his brother, George, and a reference to the book Cole (1971) was rewritten as The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter (1983). Sincere apologies to our blameless reviewer.

An article in the October Atlantic ("In Defense of C. S. Lewis") stated that the novel Kitchen Venom, by Philip Hensher, "all but glorifies pederasty." The novel in fact features a relationship between an older man and a younger man. We regret the mischaracterization.