Monday, Oct. 18, 1971

Attica (Contd.)

Sir: Your feature article on Attica prison [Sept. 27] made me want to vomit. What do you think the troopers should have attacked with--ice cream cones?

When you put these evil, vicious enemies of society in prison, they do not become Little Leaguers or Boy Scouts. Prison "reform" begins with a crackdown on these wild mavericks and the thoughtless idiots on the outside who support them.

JIM GRIFFITH Cincinnati

Sir: The irony of the Attica slaughter is indeed apparent. The inmates, branded "animals" by many, were animals only by virtue of the conditions under which they were forced to live. For a fact, zoo animals live better than do these prisoners, and zoo animals are not even supposedly being "rehabilitated."

The irony is that these so-called animals had more respect for human life than did our law-enforcement agencies. The inmates merely held their enemies hostage, while the law-enforcement agencies killed both friends and enemies alike.

C.J. CALLAHAN Rochester

Sir: In your cover story on Attica, you say: "They passed around clandestine writings of their own; among them was a poem written by an unknown prisoner, crude but touching in its would-be heroic style."

Please tell the poetry specialist who gave us the above that his "find" is a portion of one of the most famous poems ever written--known to Hitler, elementary school children to say nothing of Winston Churchill. The poem is entitled "If We Must Die,"* and the black poet is Claude McKay (1890-1948). Here is the complete poem:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

GWENDOLYN BROOKS Chicago

Rewards and Resentment

Sir: It is certainly true that positive reinforcement is superior to punishment as a tool for producing constructive behavior.

Nevertheless. B.F. Skinner's example of past successes of his concepts [Sept. 20] fail to impress me. I cannot comment on mental hospitals, jails or business firms, but as one of this nation's secondary-school students, I can testify that his principles have failed in the high schools of at least one average-sized community. For one thing, students recognize attempts to alter their behavior and meet them with resentment comparable to that created by punishment. Furthermore, if incentives are at all successful, the reward situation soon becomes the norm, deviations from which are interpreted as punishment.

MICHAEL ORR Great Falls, Mont.

Sir: You have missed the main thrust of Dr. Skinner's ideas about freedom. Skinner feels that we must accept the fact that we never have been and can never possibly be free. We cannot lose or give up something that has never been ours. What is today defined as freedom is merely a description of superficial choices a man may make.

If we accept Skinner's philosophy, we give up the definition of a word and have lost nothing.

STEVEN RUTERMAN Syracuse

Sir: Your story failed to mention Skinner's refusal ever to put his ideas to adequate scientific test. Experiments by other psychologists clearly show punishment to be highly effective in controlling behavior, especially if properly used along with reward.

Likewise, Skinner's "teaching machines" are based on scientifically disproved assumptions about the conditions important to effective human learning. Consequently, many experimental psychologists are as strongly opposed to Skinner as the "humanists and Freudian psychoanalysts" whose criticisms alone you acknowledge.

WILLIAM F. BATTIG Director Institute for the Study of Intellectual Behavior University of Colorado Boulder, Colo.

Sir: I am always surprised by people who claim to be concerned about the quality of human life yet are opposed to the behavior-modification approach. Rollo May's statement, for example, that "I have never found any place in Skinner's system for the rebel. Yet the capacity to rebel is of essence in a constructive society," overlooks the fact that rebellion comes out of oppression and suffering, and that a society that causes its members to suffer is not in the most desirable state of affairs.

Behavior therapists have succeeded where all the fine and noble men you quote have not even tried. We have gone on too long trying to make people adjust to an unhealthy environment, first telling them they have "freedom" and then that they are "sick" because they are unhappy and they do not fit. I do hope that Skinner will one day be recognized not as a menace to "free will" but as the genuine humanitarian he is, trying to design an environment where everyone is able to live a satisfying life.

MARLENE COHEN Clinical Psychologist New York City

Over the Line

Sir: Foul! Foul! Nixon surely must stoop very low to take credit for rolling down ten pins [Sept. 27], especially when many readers will plainly see that his left foot is way over the foul line.

Thus, score those two shots as one big fat zero.

MAYNARD L. WHITEHOUSE Delmar, N.Y.

Abortion and Morality

Sir: The Prince of Darkness is afoot when doctors cannot see the moral irony in trying to save those whom they tried to abort [Sept. 27]. My admiration goes to those women who have accepted the responsibility for their sexual acts and had their babies.

Ours is a morally immature society where lack of charity scorns the unwed mother and sanctions the aborting one.

JAN GISLESON New Orleans

Sir: In our ecologically minded era of recycling, surely the mutually beneficial solution to hunger in Appalachia and unwanted fetuses in New York is Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal" that "a young healthy child, well nursed, is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout." Let those who will, stomach this solution.

MARIA MASSI KREEFT West Newton, Mass.

Broken Embargo

Sir: We must protest about TIME's breaking of the embargo imposed by Buckingham Palace on the Norman Parkinson-Camera Press portraits of Princess Anne. Your Aug. 16 issue preceded the release date by several days and has caused us both embarrassment and inconvenience.

TOM BLAU Camera Press Ltd. London

> TIME regrets its inadvertent error.

Variety in Music

Sir: While there is much to admire in the artistic and creative gifts of Pierre Boulez, it seems to me to be quite impossible to accept his statement [Sept. 27] that "the most important thing to change is the musical life as it is now organized. We have too many specialized worlds that have no connection with each other."

Opera is not chamber music, and chamber music is not symphonic music. Many people respond only to one of these forms. That highly desirable situation must not change. If Maestro Boulez conducts only to effect a change, then he is willfully ignoring the musical needs of all Western civilization, which needs profound and penetrating performances of the symphonic repertoire from Bach through Brahms.

ROBERT KREIS Music Director Wheeling Symphony Orchestra Wheeling, W. Va.

Sir: What medium could have more of a future than one in which costumes, lighting, music and voices combine to form a living theatrical experience: opera.

It is you, Monsieur Boulez, who belongs under glass!

PATRICIA ALLISON St. Louis

Another Answer

Sir: After reading yet another speculation on the whereabouts of Martin Borman [Sept. 20], may I offer a simple solution?

On the afternoon of May 2, 1945, when all was quiet, the Friedrichstrasse, from the bridge as far north as one could see, was covered with a thick layer of gray dust. It was impossible to tell, even at very close range, whether the bodies were Russian or German. Anybody who got out of this alive--and I counted 13 on their feet, plus a few wounded in the cellars--will bear me out.

Isn't it possible that his body was picked up with all the rest and buried in a mass grave?

I have good reason to believe that this is what happened: I was there.

(MRS.) GISELA DATKO Uniontown, Pa.

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