Letters to the Editor

     
      DIVING RIGHT IN
      I don't usually write to editors, but I was stunned when I saw the photo of Chief Justice George at Three Rivers in the article "Force of Nature" [ESQ., May]. As an experienced white-water guide with training in swift-water rescue, the photo made me seriously question the judgment, common sense, maturity, and potential life span of the Chief Justice.
     
      On closer inspection of the photo, it appears that the image of Chief Justice George is superimposed above the rapid. I'm sure the point is to illustrate his courage and humor. Even so, I believe publishing such a photo is irresponsible. There have been at least 248 drownings on the Kern River (which has rapids like those in the photograph, which is probably a rapid on the Kaweah River) because people, particularly young people, get the impression that they can swim in water like this.
      Sherilyn McDonald
      Brea
     
      Editor's note: Staff at the California Supreme Court confirm that the photograph is real, with no adjustments or superimpositions, digital or otherwise. The photo was taken with a telephoto lens by the Chief's wife, Barbara George, at a river near a home where the family has spent vacations for decades. The Chief is very familiar with the site at which the dive took place, having swum there and explored it numerous times when the water was low and all rocks and impediments were easy to see. Far from a random launch into unknown churning waters, this was a dive into terra (perhaps that should be aqua) cognita-well known, but still challenging.
     
      A DANGEROUS MIX
      Any "movement" to mix religion and law risks harming both religion and law ["In Good Faith," ESQ., May].
     
      America was founded upon self-evident truths that any person can understand without appeal to divine revelation. This is not to say that the government can subordinate religion-indeed, freedom of conscience is protected by the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment-but religion cannot be endorsed or coerced by the government, which is the purpose behind the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
     
      Lawyers and judges should be noncognizant of divine things while working on human justice. As Abraham Lincoln counseled ("Lyceum Address," January 27, 1838): "Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense."
      Kenneth Michael White
      Upland
     
      MAN THE BABBLER
      David Balabanian's "Homo Loquens" [In Pro Per, May] was intriguing but flawed. Speech alone is mere babble. A person with Wernicke's aphasia may have fluent speech but lack comprehension. As John Henry Newman, the Oxford Tractarian, opined,
     
      [I]t is equally plain, that such communication is not the whole of the process. The enlargement consists, not merely in the passive reception into the mind of a number of ideas unknown to it, but in the mind's energetic and simultaneous action upon and towards and among those new ideas, which are rushing in upon it. It is the action of a formative power, reducing to order and meaning the matter of our acquirements; it is a making the objects of our knowledge subjectively our own, or, to use a familiar word, it is a digestion of what we receive, into the substance of our previous state of thought; and without this no enlargement is said to follow. There is no enlargement, unless there be a comparison of ideas one with another, as they come before the mind, and a systematizing of them.
      Peter G. Champion
      Visalia
     
      Editor's note: Thanks. That clarifies everything.
     
      LETTERS ON LETTERS
      In his zeal to attack Pacific Legal Foundation litigator Timothy Sandefur's argument for limited government [Letters, May], James V. Lee blames "free-market fundamentalism" for "the destruction of most of what the communist system did reasonably well" and states, "Suddenly, Joseph Stalin doesn't seem like such a terrible guy after all." Stalin murdered tens of millions of people. For most people that would make him a terrible guy.
     
      Now, what precisely did communism do so well? Run efficient gulags and notorious torture chambers masquerading as psychiatric hospitals for those yearning for freedom? Suppress all religious worship? Run a top-heavy bureaucracy where pampered Communist loyalists lived in luxurious dachas and traveled abroad, while the majority of citizens stood in bread lines and lived in dismal, crowded rabbit warrens?
     
      The Russia of today is run by Vladimir Putin, a former high-level KGB official who, along with other Communist apparatchiks and KGBites, corrupted the free-market system. They were organized, had connections, and were brutally ruthless as they enriched themselves at the expense of the Russian people. Andrei Illarionov, a former economic adviser to Putin, recently took the courageous step of criticizing Putin's government for destroying economic freedom in Russia. So, those like Mr. Lee who yearn for the bad old days should be happy-brutal, oligarchical communism is alive and well in Russia.
      Carol F. Nowicki
      Castro Valley
     
      James V. Lee criticizes the free market with a sarcastic whack at the premise that "it's beyond dispute that capitalism results in a better system of living for everyone."
     
      It is not necessary that it result in a better system of living for everyone, because no system can. It would be sufficient if capitalism resulted in a better system of living for more people than any other system could. But capitalism has proven itself even better than that: Capitalism results in a better system of living for everyone who is willing to work hard. And the American flavor of capitalism also makes provision for those who can't work.
     
      Similarly, Paul Lecky's comment [Letters, May] that Timothy Sandefur-i.e., capitalism-"endorses preserving wealth and privilege amongst the few individuals in our society blessed with the circumstances that give them money, education, and advantages not available to the majority" reeks of Dick Gephardt's "life's lottery" gaffe. It has been demonstrated time and time again that the vast majority of wealth in this country has been earned, not inherited or stumbled across. But those who want the wealth producers and the nonproducers to end up with the same amount of wealth continue to refuse to acknowledge this.
      Kurtiss Jacobs
      Concord
     

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