Our readers speak out

Scan page 23

office in New Orleans four years after Kennedy was shot, and I conferred with Assistant D.A. Jim Alcock and others.

My analysis is that three hours and ten minutes was not long enough for the movie "JFK" to do justice to what Stone was trying to say.

But the film seemed to have two major flaws. One was that it was obvious that too many scenes had been cut before the Clay Shaw trial was presented. The other flaw was that Kennedy really didn't want the United States to withdraw from S.E. Asia. He only wanted to change the steps he had been taking, in an attempt to force the South Vietnamese government and army to reform and to carry the burden of the war.

The movie was far too brief to show that Kennedy, inexperienced politician that he was, made the mistake of telling too many people he wanted to lower the 17.5 percent oil-depletion allowance, as a tax reform, and that he wanted some civil rights legislation and a detente with the USSR that would permit more trade, and a small cut in some useless military expenses.

Those expressed thoughts alone could have gotten almost anyone killed who was president at the time.

I urge everyone to see "JFK" and decide for themselves who the masters of snidery and venom really are-who operate in the dark, smelly corridors of half-truths.

Victor Saxe, Albany, Calif. propaganda logo, silk-screened onto millions of T-shirts. Art is powerful when combined with social forces for progressive change. But it can also be employed, as with the Marxistdeveloped science of dialectics, by the enemies of social change.

People can be easily fooled by artists who want to fool them. Artists have, for example, manipulated perspectives and designed rooms which appear to contradict reality. An object placed in such a room, such as a rolling ball, can appear to be defying gravity and roll uphill. A child, in another room, can appear larger than a man.

Marxists are people who debunk a lot of myths and fakery. One myth to debunk should be the notion that a particular art form associates with a particular school of politics. In our society, sadly, most professional artists are employed in jobs where they are supposed to fool people for commercial purposes.

Mike Alewitz, writing in the November Socialist Action, tells us about a controversial painting by Courbet called "Burial at Ornans." No doubt the subject caused some controversy. Mike points out that the artist is using illusions to make the painting more powerful. But we should not forget that the same tricks can be used by artists on the other side of the barricades.

Mike believes that the "disjoined perspectives" are serving a good purpose in the painting. Perhaps. But fake perspectives are not the exclusive property of progressive artists.

Non-objective art is usually a