Sir, - Shame! Shame on The Irish Times for the headline you chose for my letter in defence of the ostrich - a letter which you suppressed for several weeks and then published in the issue which you dated December 25th, 26th and 27th, when most of us were interested in a different bird entirely.
"Ruffled feathers" is a typically contemptuous put down of the wholly valid protestations I made on behalf of that seriously slandered bird - typical, that is, of you and your fellow agendists whose happiest recourse is to rabble rousing slogans and derisive name calling when rebuttal by rational argument and disciplined analysis is beyond you. as invariably it is.
I can assure you that the only thing that ruffles the ostrich's feathers is the wind, and that, as my letter pointed out, leaves it entirely unruffled in the figurative sense insinuated by you. By wit or by instinct, the ostrich knows that the evil of evil lies in its reality, and that the reality of its existence cannot transform evil to good. Not for the ostrich the stupidity of rediscovering that which every evolutionary cycle has shown to be evil and reclassifying it as unevil, simply because of the "reality" that it has come to be perpetrated rather frequently in the present phase of the cycle.
So let the defence of the ostrich stand on its merits, uneclipsed by any diversionary headline selected from the stockpile of editorial perfidy. - Yours, etc.,
Stillorgan,
Co Dublin.