To the Editor:
Several things. It’s a long term blues and bound for longer but I find, in the FIFTH ESTATE, some hope. For that, thank you. Also for:
A. Printing news items of conceptually strangulated editorial policies, conventional newspapers either minimize and bury with the obits or omit entirely. This is especially valuable to me, vitally involved and interested and yet geographically removed from the essential dialogues.
B. For sponsoring A Festival Of People, which for numerous and depressing reasons, I could not attend.
C. Some damned fine pioneer journalism.
D. For your stand on Vietnam. As a woman who is forced to live a year without her man, knowing that he is living a day to day hell physically and knowing that the hell of, by acquiescence to his superiors, he is, in a sense condoning the crimes they commit, is a thousand times worse, it is encouraging to find that others maintain the moral objections to this criminal war. Both of us feel that your editorial policies are more valid and supporting-to the men themselves than the propaganda organs of the government have so made the majority of people into believing. We feel that you offer more rationality and more support for the thousands of young men being victimized by mad draft laws and even madder foreign policy.
May I suggest that a movement be organized to educate the young men presently being used by the government and the military to perpetrate their fake patriotic crimes? It would not be an easy job, since the average GI has been brainwashed since birth not to question or decide for himself but to follow the official line without thinking. I believe a valuable embryo of doubt, planted in a brainwashed mind, would mature of itself into realizations which would molt the hawk gradually into a dove.
If there is anything I can do to assure the survival of your excellent rag, let me know.
Poyner’s Woman
Traverse City
To the Editor:
I have been reading the FIFTH ESTATE for the past few months, and I am glad that “something is happening” in Detroit, in the form of the paper, and Plum Street.
Since your paper is now exchanging material with the EVO, FREE PRESS, etc. I have a suggestion to make.
Why not exchange poetry with these papers also? Poetry is the one thing I find lacking in the FIFTH ESTATE. Devote a certain number of inches each issue to a poetry corner, or whatever.
Christina Pacosz
Detroit, Michigan
To the Editor,
How did your last attempt ever pass the censors and the FBI? Doesn’t Larry Miller have any other words in his limited vocabulary besides “org—m”? Also his comparison of Christian martyrs with the pasty-faced faggoty followers of the Beatles was disgusting.
Moreover your constant barrage of ACLU articles (an identified subversive unit) can only lead to the assumption that you are all a bunch of commie perverts.
Mr. Ovshinsky and staff, I shall see you at the phantasmagoria. And in hell.
A virile American