Madam, - America has its problems, Lord knows. Our president's a clown, we're stuck in an ugly and unnecessary war, the economy's bad, we're getting fat from all the junk we've been eating, there's nothing on TV. But until I read Tim O'Halloran's letter of August 26th, I had no idea just how badly off we were. Infantilised? Contemptuous of education? Anti-intellectual? He's given me food for thought, and I appreciate it.
I guess I'll have to console myself with Mark Twain, Henry James, Arthur Miller, Margaret Mead, Jackson Pollock, Louis Armstrong, Aaron Copeland, Arthur Miller, Georgia O'Keefe, Paul Auster, Dizzy Gillespie, Martin Luther King, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, John Cheever, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Frank Lloyd Wright, Miles Davis, Noam Chomsky, Buddy Holly, Ring Lardner, William James, John Reed, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Edgar Allan Poe, Nora Zeale Hurston, James McNeil Whistler, Jack Kerouac, Charlie Parker, David Mamet, James Agee, Truman Capote, Orson Welles, Thomas Pynchon, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Groucho Marx, Paul Goodman, Edith Wharton, William Carlos Williams, Thomas Edison, John Sloane, Henry Miller, Herman Melville, E.B. White, Mary McCarthy, Joseph Mitchell, e.e. cummings, Pete Seeger, John Updike, Edmund White, Jonas Salk, Philip Glass, Pete Hamill, Joyce Carol Oates, John-Michel Basquiat, Howard Zinn, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver, Dee Brown, John James Audubon, Stanford White, Saul Bellow, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, John Berryman, Ambrose Bierce, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Langston Hughes, Buster Keaton, Robert Lowell, Emily Dickenson, Maya Angelou, Ogden Nash, Herbert Asbury, Leonard Bernstein, Walt Whitman, Frank Geary, E.L.Doctrow, Studs Turkel, Edith Wharton, Richard Ford, John Steinbeck, James Thurber, the young Elvis Presley and whoever else there is lying around. It ain't much, I agree, but it's all we have. - Yours, etc,
IVAN ROBERTSON,
Wintergarden,
Pearse Street,
Dublin 2.