Letters

David Frum (July) argues that every White House team overcompensates for the flaws of the previous regime. He may be right, but one of his examples is wrong. He says that Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon's Democratic successor (after the unmentioned Gerald Ford interlude), reacted against the "ultra-hierarchical" Nixon White House by involving himself in almost every aspect of office management. "The result? Another legendary failure, symbolised by the story that Carter… found himself deciding who could use the White House tennis courts."

I don't know if Carter did this, but Nixon certainly did. When several senior members of his cabinet argued against the invasion of Cambodia in April 1970, he retaliated by ordering the removal of the White House tennis court—"a spiteful way to take a jab at the cabinet by removing one of the 'perks' many of them enjoyed," as Nixon's chief of staff Bob Haldeman noted in his diary. And on the eve of his broadcast about the Cambodian incursion, Nixon spent all day and most of the night working on the speech, interrupting his labours only to call Haldeman to discuss where to put a new pool table, as there wasn't enough space in the White House solarium. "Absolutely astonishing he could get into trivia on the brink of the biggest step he's taken so far," Haldeman wrote. Not all that astonishing, actually: Nixon was more than a match for Carter when it came to sweating the small stuff. The only surprise, given Nixon's paranoia, is that he didn't suspect his enemies of somehow contriving the pool table crisis as a reprisal for the tennis court ban.

Francis Wheen
Pleshey, Essex

Trimble vs Powell
5th July 2008

Jonathan Powell (Letters, July) says that his and Blair's sympathetic approach to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness was based on information available to them at the time. But in a recent interview, Blair has said that they disregarded intelligence advice. I cannot resolve that difference. Nor was I privy to the information they received, though I regularly told Jonathan I doubted its quality.

As to the suggestion that my criticism reflects hindsight, I refer to my statement made at an open meeting on 3rd October 1998: "Behind the change by the republican movement was a realisation that their campaign was failing and that if the campaign continued, their only future was the slow decline and extinction of that campaign. I think that they decided that, while the campaign still had some life in it, they would try to cash it in for some political advantage."

David Trimble
London SW1

Intellectuals poll 1
26th June 2008

Tom Nuttall's analysis (July) of the Muslim domination of your intellectuals poll is interesting. But even more interesting is the way different polls draw attention from different societies. A few years ago, the BBC's "greatest star of the millennium" was Bollywood's Amitabh Bachchan, and cricinfo.com's top umpire poll was won by Srinivasaraghavan Venkataraghavan: both Indians. The fact that polls on film and cricket mobilised India's net-connected while a public intellectual poll didn't says something about India today. And what does it say that white celebs dominate the most handsome or beautiful polls?

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Lancaster

Intellectuals poll 2
6th July 2008

Your editorial response to the bizarre intellectuals poll is too phlegmatic. This is far more significant than the rigging of pop charts.

Not all Muslims, but all Islamists, are highly organised and, like the Socialist Workers' party, can use democracy to destroy democracy. I voted for Muhammad Yunus and Ayaan Hirsi Ali because of their qualities, not because of their relationship to Islam. However, several other members of your top 20 are Islamic extremists who defend terrorism and hate the west, especially western women. These people are medievalist religious demagogues, not intellectuals. They are there because their followers are organised and bent on winning the battle of ideas, and probably more tangible battles as well.

Martin Bright
Bracknell

Intellectuals poll 3
7th July 2008

We are all better off, I'm sure, for knowing more of Fethullah Gülen. But I shall regard future winners of the global intellectuals poll with the same studious gravity with which I note the winner of the Eurovision song contest.

Edward Laxton
via the Prospect blog

God, souls and Grayling
26th June 2008

AC Grayling's column (July) is seriously misleading. He seems to think that religious belief entails mind-body dualism. Not so—Judaism and Christianity do not depend on belief in separate mind-soul "stuff," and there has always been a strong concept of the unity of body and mind in the Christian traditions.

Grayling also wrongly implies that belief in an afterlife depends on dualism. In fact, Christian resurrection is envisaged as the raising of a new body, not a disembodied soul. Grayling also makes it plain that he thinks dualists, and anyone who takes afterlife ideas seriously, are fools. He is welcome to his opinion, but it does not do justice to the distinguished philosophers who have found both to be coherent and defensible ideas.

Ian Christie
London SW20

The mystery of capital 1
30th June 2008

Julian Gough (July) is right that financial capitalism has taken the place of religion, but not for the reason he claims. The real reason is that it has become our way of facing the future. To cope with the risks of life—war, famine, disease, poverty, old age—we used to depend on family, local community or religion. By the late 20th century, however, we were more likely to look to state welfare, insurance policies or pension funds—all which need economic growth to continue making provision for us. As Robert Samuelson said: "The triumphant religion of the 20th century was not Christianity or Islam but economic growth." When this falters, our faith is threatened. There is nothing mysterious about the sacred status of financial capitalism: it is an expression of our need to trust in the future.

Geoffrey Hosking
London NW1

The mystery of capital 2
15th July 2008

It's a pity that Julian Gough (July) repeats the tired old canard that allegedly high suicide rates in Scandinavia "prove" that socialism doesn't work. According to the World Health Organisation, suicide rates in Sweden, Norway and Denmark are lower than those in France, Belgium and Switzerland. And of the ten countries with the highest rates, seven (Lithuania, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, Hungary, Slovenia, Latvia) are in the former communist bloc. There's no evidence that social democracy encourages suicide; but in eastern Europe, the painful transition to free market capitalism has certainly done so.

Alexander Jacoby
London SE6

The meaning of freedom
7th July 2008

Helen Goodman's defence of Labour's philosophy of freedom (July) drains the word of all meaning. She argues that opening a lap-dancing club curtails the freedom of young women to walk the streets safely. By this logic, smoking curtails people's freedom to breathe smokeless air, and extending detention without trial protects our freedom to live unthreatened by terrorism. Almost any potential harm or offence committed by a non-state actor can be described as "curtailing others' freedom," providing almost limitless justification for state control.

Helen Jackson
Cambridge

Bring on the referendums
3rd July 2008

Andrew Moravcsik (July) is undoubtedly right that the Irish referendum was hijacked by well-heeled special interest groups. But the lesson is not that we should have fewer referendums, but many more. They should be conducted online with a frequency that becomes monotonous. Only then will people bother to vote on things they feel strongly about, and democracy can be reunited with the will of the people.

Jason Streets
Frant, East Sussex

Rage against the machines
8th July 2008

Tom Chatfield's article (June) on the future of computer games is clever and well crafted, but ultimately says nothing. Chatfield endears us with limber prose, but his piece is one more on the growing heap of "games may have more potential than we know," which always end with a disclaimer. Susan Greenfield is taken to task, and then acknowledged as fair. Steven Johnson is both "brain candy" and part of a "philistine current." Games are immersive and educational, then trivial and solipsistic.

Chatfield's perspective never veers off to the margins, where innovation is flourishing. As an example of the artistry of the medium, he uses Ico from 2001. Why not Portal, a game launched in 2007 that perfectly embodies the laws of physics, or Peacemaker, about the middle east conflict? This is where the real cultural shift is taking place. The biggest successes, World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto, have important aspects, but they are not the best examples of the maturing of the medium. We don't look to American Idol as an indicator of the potential merits of television simply because it's the most prevalent model.

And Chatfield doesn't address the most interesting question of all: what do games do better than books and television?

Suzanne Seggerman
Games for Change

History's losers
27th June 2008

David Herman's essay on the new pessimism in history (July) was illuminating. Just as, almost a century ago, historians like the Hammonds discovered that the lives of working people were as interesting as those of heroes and statesmen, we now have historians who find it as interesting to study those who got killed in battles as those who did the killing. If the purpose of history is to help us to live more wisely in the future, this is a welcome development.

Malcolm Verrall
Wolverhampton