Facing Life with Charlie Brown

Sir: Re the expression on Charlie Brown's face: happiness is indeed being on the cover of TIME [April 9].

CHARLES MIHLE JR. College Park, Md.

Sir: Good grief, you blockheads! It's about time Charlie and friends made your cover. Are they not society in a Peanuts shell? That was a terrific cover and article.

BARBARA L. BILLOWS New London, Conn.

Sir: I think I speak for the millions of likable, well-meaning guys like myself who continually muddle up everything that they undertake in life, when I say that it was gratifying to see our hero finally make good. Perhaps there is still hope for the rest of us Charlie Browns.

DONALD L. SINGER Evanston, Ill.

Sir: You mention a Negro in an adventure comic strip being rubbed out by the syndicate "for fear of offending Southern readers." In the humorous comic strips this censorship is done in fear of offending not Southern readers but Negro readers. Cartoons are caricatures meant to make people look and act funny. Negroes are now understandably touchy about being depicted thus, so there are very few Negro cartoon characters (other than savages and primitives, and the syndicates have started clamping down on these because of the new African countries). So the cartoonist finds himself in a dilemma. If he omits Negroes from his comics, he is discriminating against them, and if he includes them, he is ridiculing them.

DAVE BREGER* South Nyack, N.Y.

Sir: We have learned never to underestimate the power of Peanuts. The Gospel According to Peanuts has soared in popularity. Its seventh printing brings the total number of copies in print to 210,000. The book's success has backfired on Author Robert Short. While he has been conveniently putting himself through school on Peanuts by giving color-slide lectures on the theological implications in that comic strip, he now finds himself in danger of lecturing himself right out of his Ph.D. program. Receiving so many requests now to "unshell Peanuts," he hasn't cracked a book since Christmas!

TADASHI AKAISHI John Knox Press Richmond

Sir: Never is Charlie Brown called Charlie! It's like writing Amerigo when you mean Amerigo Vespucci, like saying Edna for Edna St. Vincent Millay. It's like saying Ponce or Genghis or Pontius. Good grief!

(FATHER) CRONAN KELLY, O.F.M. New York City

Discord on Asia

Sir: The essay "Discrimination and Discord in Asia" [April 9] hits the target, but being a Sindhi myself, I can say that Sindhis and Punjabis have been living no less peacefully in the past few centuries than the English and the French.

PAMO K. BHATIA Ann Arbor, Mich.

Sir: Somehow, the point of your essay on Asian hate and discrimination completely escapes me. Despite feeble disclaimers, it smacks of the smug American, caught again in embarrassing racial strife, chortling defensively: "Ah ha! You see, those sanctimonious Asians are just as ugly, prejudiced and hateful as we Americans are!" One wonders whether the American Negro of Selma, Ala., would fully agree with your sweeping judgment that "America's problems are subject to a system of social and legal redress." At best it has been a spotty "system," hundreds of years in coming. There is little pride, and small comfort, in trumpeting with such profundity that other nations' "backyards" are as filled with human hate and discrimination as is ours!

JERRY M. TINKER Washington, D.C.

Brainy but Mindless

Sir: Artzybasheff's computer [April 2] looks, and probably is, a contemporary Siva, the many-handed god of procreation, conservation, and ultimately destruction.

IGNACE B. BURSTYN Outremont, Que.

Sir: You will no doubt receive a good many shocked letters assuming that computers are gigantic monsters ready to turn on their creators. I, for one, am perfectly willing to believe that the computer will remain a docile slave. But whose slave is it going to be? As far as I can see, the only people who will not lead an aphid-like existence in the future will be a very small group of scientific experts whose exclusive knowledge and interpretation of the mysteries of the Unfathomable Machine will give them powers far greater than those held by any similar elite in history. I once asked a brilliant mathematician what sort of program he envisioned for the leisurely masses of the modern Hellenic era that he, like Dr. Fein, kept predicting. "Well," he stuttered, "there'd be picnics and lots of good music, and things like that."

U. C. KNOEPFLMACHER Berkeley, Calif.

Sir: Your description of computers as "waited upon by crisp, young, white-shirted men who move softly among them like priests serving a shrine" brought smiles to myself and my fellow programmers. At a certain research installation we had a computer that would periodically begin rather violent vibrations whenever the random access unit was used.

This caused us little inconvenience, however, because an unknown computer operator had previously discovered that one swift kick at the center of the random access unit and precisely two feet off the floor would keep the computer still for weeks. Familiarity does breed contempt --even for computers.

(A/2C) ROBERT J. MORALES Kelley A.F.B., Texas

Sir:

Translation: Congraduations on an excellent article concerning computers. TIME has done it again again again again . . . . . . . .

DEC 67 DNZ DR530R74T99 06 37

(RONALD DANZIG) Chicago

Sir: Here is one more example of the computers' absolute literal-mindedness. A computer was programmed to translate English into Russian and vice versa. On technical articles, where words generally have a very precise meaning, it did fairly well. But it was decided to find out what the machine would do with a more lyrical type of writing. The quotation "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" was fed into the computer, which promptly translated it into Russian and then translated the Russian back into English. The results: "The ghost is ready, but the meat is raw."

LINDA M. MYERS White Sands Missile Range, N. Mex. .

Klannishness

Sir: The Klan was started, as you said [April 9], 100 years ago but, heaven knows, not as a social club for bored Southern gentry. It was formed by leading members of the Southern communities to protect their women and homes from Reconstruction carpetbagger thugs and freed Negroes. Many Negroes returned to their homes or sought work with others, but there were many who, spurred on by crooked politicians and lawmen, raped, robbed and generally browbeat decent citizens. I am a descendant of one of the original Klansmen and have heard of these things all my life. The decent, law-abiding Negro was never set upon--only the criminal element. I am not saying that the Klan has never made a mistake. There are mistakes made in the greatest organizations and movements. I do say that Klansmen were right in what they did at the time.

MRS. H. JAY San Francisco

Gas v. Bullets

Sir: As a tail gunner in the R.A.F. in World War II who was shot down over Nazi Germany in 1943 and imprisoned, may I say that I would rather have a bellyful of nonlethal gas than a bellyful of lead any time! Let us hope that this is mankind's first step toward war that does not kill.

BASIL C. ANDERSON Trinidad

Sir: Any weapon that removes part of the glamorous, heroic aspect of warfare is a giant step forward toward ultimate peace. If all weapons could be nonlethal, the ridiculousness of war would be truly manifest!

MRS. JAMES L. WHITEHOUSE Detroit

Legal Murder

Sir: If capital punishment [April 2] is, in fact, a logical method of crime deterrence, then executions should be held in public and should be as grisly as possible. If it is a matter of revenge, then the nearest kin of the murder victim should be allowed to execute the murderer. If, on the other hand, executions are neither vindictive nor deterrent, then they are merely a way to save taxpayers the expense of supporting the cost of life imprisonment of a criminal.

All three excuses are embarrassingly barbaric; the whole issue should have died generations ago.

ANDREW FRANCESCA New York City

Sir: If individual A murders individual B, then is apprehended and put to death, he cannot kill individuals C, D, E, and so on. The deterrent effect on individual A has been 100%. This is such simple logic that even a sociologist should be able to grasp it.

FRANK L. HOWE Sun Prairie, Wis.

Sir: The statistics on capital punishment imply unanswered questions. What if Alabama has the highest murder rate per 100,000 people and Vermont the lowest? The rate of murders, especially those stemming from familial passion, might be related to the age composition of the population and the relative number of families in each of these states.

Alabama has a younger population than Vermont's. All other states have more unrelated individuals per 100 families than Alabama. Only four other states have proportionally more unrelated individuals than Vermont.

(MRS.) HELEN PARKE Statistician Philadelphia

Culturette & Tar Pitter

Sir: We thoroughly enjoyed your article on the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art [April 2]. Now that you have immortalized us with the title "Culturettes," we may poke out our tongues at all the cynical husbands who have referred to us over the years as "steelyeyed businesswomen" and "con artists."

LAURELLE BURTON Art Museum Council Los Angeles

Sir: Art is fine for Los Angeles, but we enjoyed the La Brea Tar Pits immensely. Must they go? It looked like pure geology to us--made and in the making --and a fine spot to get an insight into the process.

ELIZABETH STANTON COTTLE Highland Park, NJ.

Iller Eastern Winds

Sir: As a onetime aerologist, I found Chicago's notorious ill winds [April 2] largely a myth. Weather Bureau records show Chicago's average wind speed as 10.1 m.p.h., with an alltime high of only 60 m.p.h., compared with 14.5 m.p.h. and 113 m.p.h. respectively for New York City.

SAM PISICCHIO Los Alamitos, Calif.

Mars on the Skyline

Sir: Your description of Chicago's forthcoming John Hancock Center as a glass-enclosed oil derrick [April 2] is commendable. The ugliness of this building is a monument to public apathy, which has allowed such monstrosities as Boston's 52-story Prudential Tower, Manhattan's Pan American Building, and innumerable other glass boxes to become reality. I cannot believe that people just do not care. But when the complaints finally materialize, our once graceful city skylines will be irreparably marred.

JOHN W. SPARKS Boston

No Spies

Sir: Although Willmark Service System, Inc., through the use of professional shoppers, tests sales-personnel activities, its functions do not include the placement of "counterspy workers" in plants [March 26]. In fact, Willmark's only association with manufacturers, other than retail checking, is of a marketing-research and promotional nature under the auspices of its subsidiary Willmark Research Corp.

ROBERT M. BERNSTEIN Willmark Service System, Inc. New York City

Artful Increase

Sir: Since the appearance of TIME'S article about the Metropolitan Museum [March 19], there has been a 25% increase in attendance.

HARRY S. PARKER III The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City

*Creator of Mr. Breger.

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