I am appalled that the lawsuit against the agency is moving forward. The consensus that the ad should have never run, during the Super Bowl or at any other time, is not the issue at hand. Ultimately, Just For Feet signed off on producing and running the spot. The creatives may have badgered the executives to move forward with the ad, but that violates neither any law nor the agency/client contract I'm sure the two parties have. The staff at Saatchi & Saatchi would not have stopped working on a million-dollar spot set to air during the biggest TV event of the year just because the client decided to kill their first (and ultimately misguided) concept.

As nauseating as a blatantly distasteful commercial is, yet another frivolous lawsuit is even harder to stomach.

-- Rob Baird
Art Director
West & Vaughan Advertising

The ad may have been from hell, but the free publicity is from heaven. I never heard of Just for Feet until I read your article. I hope Harold Ruttenberg is victorious in court -- creativity need not pander to racist images in advertising. Even more injurious to Just for Feet was Fox's shifting of the ad to the fourth quarter when Just for Feet had newspaper ads promoting the commercials in the third quarter. If there's any justice, Saatchi & Saatchi should be obliged to create a new ad for Just for Feet, at Saatchi's expense, to Ruttenberg's satisfaction, with Fox airing the spot as a "make good" in its next ratings-bonanza sporting event.

-- Lori R. Price
Bristol, Conn.

Sincere meditations
BY ANNE LAMOTT
(05/27/99)

Anne Lamott and all those captivated by David Roche must read Mario Vargas Llosa's beautiful short novel "The Storyteller," the astoundingly parallel story of a Peruvian with a raised, purple, disfiguring birthmark on half of his face, who becomes a storyteller among a primitive Amazon tribe, "the figure ancestrally entrusted with the task of arousing the curiosity, the fantasy, the memory, the appetite for dreams and fabrication" of his people. What more fitting description of Roche, or of a writer like Lamott?

-- Beth LaDow
Winchester, Mass.

Traitor in chief
BY DAVID HOROWITZ
(05/28/99)

David Horowitz ignores or glosses over one key point in the Cox Report: The leaks at our national labs are a direct result of GOP privatizing of security forces. Every secret garnered by our enemies came from the Reagan/Bush administrations. Does he really think that a few thousand dollars in campaign contributions was enough to buy the level of treason he suggests?

Even more frightening is his call for renewed efforts to build a missile defense system. I shudder to think how many billions of our tax dollars were flushed down the toilet in that effort. The brightest scientists in the world told Reagan that it would be decades before that kind of technology existed, if it ever did. Should we further mortgage our future on that pipe dream?

He says that history will judge this administration harshly. I have no doubt that historians will view the Reagan/Bush years as the time our nation was brought to the brink of ruin. Clinton saved us from the GOP.

-- Charles H. Lumsden
Houston

Horowitz's blind trust in the China data provided by the CIA is pretty amusing, since the CIA didn't even know the correct address of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. His apologies for the Chinese spying done under past Republican administrations are worth a few chuckles, too. After all, the Nixon, Reagan and Bush administrations' Cold War courtship of the Chinese precipitated this situation. Most delicious of all is his tone of offended virtue. The United States has spied on China and the rest of the world for decades; is anyone surprised that they are busily spying back?

-- Nancy Ott
Pittsburgh

In his ravings against Bill Clinton, David Horowitz suggests that Bill is somehow personally guilty of handing secrets to China. Horowitz is wrong. Missile and satellite information was handed to China by Big Business. Horowitz slides right past the names of Loral and Hughes, who actually gave secrets to the Chinese, and suggests it's all Clinton's fault because he accepted "bribes" (in the form of campaign contributions) from those companies, waived security standards and enabled them to give away the store. Why aren't these multibillion-dollar companies named as traitors by Horowitz?

Maybe Horowitz should step back a bit and ask why Loral and Hughes were in China launching U.S. satellites. Was it impossible for them to buy rockets and rent launch facilities in the United States? Of course they could have. They chose not to because it was cheaper in China. Because of the "privatization" of the satellite launching business, these corporations were free to take sensitive technologies (developed with taxpayer money) and hardware (paid for by taxpayers) to a foreign country in their quest to save a buck. U.S. jobs were lost to low-paid foreigners while U.S. corporations made money. Very NAFTA-esque. Very popular with Republicans.

-- Ron Ralston

DAVID HOROWITZ RESPONDS ...

Anyone who can write that "every secret garnered by our enemies came from the Reagan/Bush administrations" is ignorant of the contents of the bipartisan Cox Report. Read it. Perhaps Nancy Ott has a private anti-missile defense that makes her so complacent. Perhaps she will share it with the rest of us. As for Ron Ralston's claim that big business did it, as though every large business in America were culpable, perhaps it's worth reminding him that the head of Loral is the largest individual Clinton campaign contributor.

Shays calls the GOP's bluff
BY JAKE TAPPER
(05/27/99)

Although I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, I always vote for Chris Shays because I trust him to vote his conscience and to take a stand against his party if that's what he honestly feels has to be done. His actions, then, best represent his Fairfield County constituents, because he doesn't automatically toe the party line. Imagine if only we had more politicians like Shays: Congresspeople giving serious thought and consideration to issues, weighing the input of the people who elected them rather than just voting with their party to stay in favor with the speaker. How different would our government be if more people were willing to piss off the patricians?

-- Anne Flounders
Stamford, Conn.

The teachings of Bill Bonanno: A wise-guy way of knowledge
BY DOUGLAS CRUICKSHANK
(05/27/99)

I am writing in defense of the mafioso Mr. Ed. "Mafiosi" is the plural of "mafioso," which functions as both noun and adjective. It is indeed applied to animals as well as people, as Mr. Bonanno so ineptly attempts to point out, since its basic meaning has nothing to do with crime but rather refers to stylistic qualities of magnificence, spiritedness and swagger. "Mafioso" is, in fact, often used to describe particularly impressive horses.

In all seriousness, it is understandably annoying to have one's language treated so cavalierly by either American journalists or Italian-American authors. The all too common sloppiness exhibited in regard to even the most elementary Italian usage by Americans is suggestive of an underlying attitude toward Italians as a people who do not possess a language of a stature equal to English, German, French and Spanish.

This attitude can only be counted an ironic example of cultural prejudice, as well as yet another commentary on the sad state of American education, since Italian is the only major European tongue whose literature of the 13th century remains comprehensible to today's speakers, due to its consistently well-defined nature and the incomparably long unbroken history of its literary tradition.

-- Tom DiFelice
Philadelphia