The Bottom Line: Expressions of Opinion

Adam Bauman's article on the "huge porn cache" found on a computer at Lawrence Livermore Lab (July 12) goes to some lengths to represent the internet as some sort of hangout for the Mafia and the KGB, devoted to porn peddling, espionage, and software piracy. This is very far from the whole truth, or even part of it.

Mr. Bauman quotes the size of the cache as being "more than 1,000 pornographic images," taking up "nearly 2,000 megabytes" of space. Aside from the fact that, in modern terms, 2,000 megabytes is almost nothing (my desktop machine at work holds half that amount on its hard disk drive), 1,000 computer images -- pornographic or otherwise -- will take up on the order of 100 megabytes, less than half the space available on the average home computer today.

A hypothesis that the photos in question were used to transmit encoded data about machines and passwords will not bear close examination. No one in his right mind would choose to transmit such data in that manner, when it would be easier -- and much more secure -- to print the data out on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, and glue a 29-cent stamp to it.

Far from being exclusively a channel for software pirates to move their wares, the Internet Relay Chat system is a discussion network for all sorts of topics. I remember watching news come out of the LA area on three IRC channels on the day of the Northridge earthquake, hours before the same news was announced on the television networks.

This evening, using the internet, I scanned an on-line discussion of free speech, participated in a discussion about the fantasy works of Robert Jordan, downloaded a couple of preprints of astrophysics papers, checked out the White House electronic on-line archives, read about various national varieties of football in a globe-spanning Esperanto newsgroup, and E-mailed letters to half a dozen acquaintances. I saw no pornographic pictures, pirated no software, and sold no state secrets to Saddam Hussein's secret police.

Charles V. Hughes, candidate for the post of Representative of the 7th Congressional District, accuses his opponent, incumbent Congressman George Miller, of dumping the onus of supporting last year's "tax hike" on the 98.8% of us who are poor working stiffs, instead of on the wealthy 1.2% who were intended to take up the slack. Mr. Hughes also claims that increased federal spending since the tax increase has led to $500-million-per-day deficit spending.

Using the figures Mr. Hughes himself provides in his letter, borrowed by him from the Heritage Foundation (itself an organization not known for its dispassionate treatment of matters political), the non-innumerate reader can easily see that the average member of the 1.2% crowd is paying approximately 50 times as much in additional taxes as the average member of the group Mr. Hughes, in a nice Freudian slip, classifies as "you". Perhaps Mr. Hughes' adamant opposition to this disparity indicates that, for some reason, he finds these taxes more personally burdensome than "you" do.

Furthermore, the spectre of $500 million per day in deficit spending should not be too daunting, given that during the last eight years of Republican government we were enjoying some $700-$800 million per day of borrow-and-spend. That deficit spending has been reduced as far as it has is rather amazing. Those who have ever seen a circus parade will recognize that it takes a certain amount of time and effort to clean up the large, steaming messes that elephants leave behind them.

In 1980 George Bush described Ronald Reagan's plans to reduce the deficit by increasing expenditures while reducing income as "voodoo economics". I will not, however, insult voodoo by applying that epithet to Mr. Hughes' arithmetic and history.

I will not disagree with your editor that there is "no reason yet to invade" Haiti (Aug. 10). Haiti, this hemisphere's second independent nation and the world's second democracy, largely owes its current miserable state to earlier interventions and at least one long-term occupation by the United States, carried out in an era when, as in this one, financial considerations were considered more important than moral or ethical ones. Furthermore, the sight of a U.S. president rattling sabers like the very best of generals, when his own personal history is singularly devoid of military experience, is at best laughable.

I was less than impressed, however, by the same editor's remarks that "[deposed Haitian president] Aristide is not much better than the generals and there are questions about his commitment to democracy." In the first place, the reason that Aristide is out of power is that he was unwilling to apply deadly force to his political enemies; the generals have shown no such compunctions. To someone who wants to raise his voice in protest, the difference is that between being allowed to do so and finding himself dead in a heap of corpses in the town square. To me, this is a significant difference. It would be even more significant if I were a Haitian.

As to the "questions", I can only say that "there is..." and "there are..." sentences have no place in a news story or editorial; when I see them, as when I see an agentless passive or a sentence that begins with "It is well known that...", I know either that the writer is trying to lie to me or that he has swallowed someone else's lies and is simply passing them on. In this case, I would ask: what questions? and, who has raised them? and, why?

It is interesting to see, in The European of 23-29 September, Dr. Karl Steiner repeating the same arguments used over the past century to promote Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Occidental, Novial, Suma, and more than a thousand other constructed languages in support of his idea to create a new European language Euro, while at the same time quoting the "failure" of all the mentioned planned languages.

It would be interesting to see Dr. Steiner's definition of "failure". Esperanto, spoken a little over a century ago by not so much as one person, is today used by some two million people around the world (figure from The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1994 edition), despite its lack of support from any government or major international institution -- this during a century when even "natural" languages without such support have tended to wither and die on the vine.

Perhaps, however, Dr. Steiner is depending on the support of the political and economic apparat in Brussels to enforce learning of Euro. I wish him luck. He will need it.

In your editorial "English Everywhere" (Aug. 15), you mention that it is "a shame that only a handful of people in sandals" can understand the Esperanto-language Bible. Aside from the fact that none of the handful of people in my household who can understand the Esperanto Bible wears sandals, it seems unlikely that, absent a market of people who can understand the book, the British and Foreign Bible Society would have kept it in print and on the market for more than half a century, or that a competing Esperanto translation of the Gospels would recently have been published in and marketed from Brazil.

As to the number of speakers of English, your figure of "one third of the world's population" seems a bit exaggerated. That would be almost two billion people. The largest figure I have seen quoted previously was 1.4 billion, and that was obtained through the devious process of adding up the populations of all countries whose governments use English as an official language rather than counting actual speakers. In fact, half that number came from India alone, where lack of knowledge of English is far, far more common than knowledge of the language. The World Almanac and Book of Facts figure of five hundred million seems considerably more realistic.

As to the children of today's go-getters "taking Chinese" ... no. Your children will be taking Chinese. But I suppose that will be their problem, not yours.

Joe Saumarez Smith's article "Pop Star's Words of Comfort for Esperanto" (Nov. 6) seems to me to be a rather silly compendium of errors and misrepresentations, coming from so reputable a journal as yours.

Smith states that "Supporters of Esperanto ... have turned to Michael Jackson ..." To the best of my knowledge, no supporters of Esperanto turned to Michael Jackson; the idea of using Esperanto in his promotional video was apparently the idea of his own creative staff, and the first information those of us here on his own turf had about it was an internet posting of a throwaway comment that appeared in your own newspaper in September.

Smith advises us that "Esperanto has long been associated with Marxism and anti-clericalism". This may come as a terrible shock to the Catholic organization which publishes Espero Katolika, the oldest extant Esperanto magazine, to the Vatican, which regularly broadcasts in Esperanto, and to Polish Solidarity, which used Esperanto to keep the outside world informed of events in that country during its struggle with the Communist government in the early 1980's.

Smith also repeats the old chestnut about Esperanto enjoying "peak popularity" in the 1920s and 1930s. A survey in 1928 showed that at that time there were some 127,000 speakers of Esperanto in the world; according to the 1994 World Almanac and Book of Facts, the number of speakers today is approximately two million. Some peak! Furthermore, to state that Esperanto has "lost many devotees to Interglosa" (which in fact has not existed since about 1943; perhaps Smith means Glosa, a language which has received some publicity in Britain in the past two years, though, to the best of my knowledge, nowhere else) is, aside from the fact that there is no evidence of this, logically akin to suggesting that every time a British schoolboy learns French, English has lost another speaker.

I was pleased to see in today's paper (Dec. 15) that the federal government, in its zealous search for financial frivolities serving only the special interests, will be cutting the Capitols trains between San Jose and Sacramento. Based on the figures you quote in the article, I calculate that this will save me, and every other American, the princely sum of four fifths of a cent per year in Amtrak subsidies.

I would like to see this extra cash show up in my biweekly paycheck so that I and my family might take our vacation on the Costa del Sol next year, but I know that it must be used to pay for items of great import to the American people. For instance, the savings involved in cutting the Capitols, when collected for a thousand years, will pay for one B-2 stealth bomber. B-2 bombers don't seem to be on the table with Amtrak; perhaps they are too heavy, and would break the table. And the technology has already proved its multi-billion-dollar value in bringing the occasional Central American drug dealer to justice and the occasional third-world tinpot dictator to heel. Unfortunately, the B-2 can't be used to replace the Capitols, since it is not designed to carry passengers to Sacramento -- or anywhere else, for that matter.

Of course, if we really want to cut the budget deficit while keeping both trains and planes, we might consider declaring a moratorium on servicing the national debt. At one fell swoop this would convert our massive deficit to a handy little surplus, which might -- impractical as it may sound -- be applied to retiring the debt principal. It would also have the same effect -- only more so! -- as the proposed balanced budget amendment: it would not only put our budget in balance immediately, so that the government would no longer have to borrow, but it would also prevent the government from borrowing money in the future, by discouraging potential lenders.

President Clinton has announced program cuts totalling some $75 million dollars over the next five years. The new Republican Congress should be able to equal that with cuts in public services; it would only take fifty Public Broadcasting Systems, six thousand Capitols railway services, or some combination thereof. This would reduce the deficit by thirty billion dollars a year.

But that's not the whole story. The Republican "contract with America" promises to distribute largesse to worthy Americans to $100 billion more than revenues. Furthermore, interest just on the deficits for this year and the next four years will be at least $100 billion -- and that's only if the government balances the budget by 1999; more likely, the deficit will remain more or less where it is, or even increase, and the figure in question will be at least $150 billion. So net expenditure reductions seem unlikely.

In this situation, a fourth grader could see what the result of a tax cut will be. Unfortunately (though not for the Republican ideologues, nor for Mr. Clinton, both of whom seem anxious to use our money to buy our votes) fourth graders don't vote.

My wife took great pleasure in reading Ann Philips' letter on Prop. 187 (Dec. 29) aloud to me. She was particularly amused by Ms. Philips' observation that "the Mexicans here do not learn our language or try to. They do not want to blend with our ways as other immigrants from Europe did and they keep their own customs." My wife, who is a Mexican immigrant, was so entranced with this letter (which, strangely enough, seemed to be in English) that she missed a few minutes of her favorite TV program, Remington Steele.

One question she asked me made me think for a moment. "What would this lady do if a Yurok Indian insisted on keeping his own customs and speaking his own language?" The only answer I could come up with -- impractical as it might seem -- was "send him back where he came from."

It is good to know that Ms. Philips recognizes that "people in this country illegally are breaking the law. There are proper ways to enter the United States of America." I feel sure that all her ancestors went through the proper bureaucratic procedures of obtaining a visa before setting sail from Plymouth, and that, upon arrival in the territory of the Massachussetts people, they immediately went through the proper bureaucratic procedures of obtaining a green card (work permit), and agreed to speak the language and follow the customs of the people already resident there. Right, Ms. Philips?