Changes in Eastern Bloc

Whenever Jeane Kirkpatrick puts pen to paper she succumbs to an impulse to regurgitate a batch of cliches about communism and totalitarianism (“Give Aid That Stimulates, Braces, Helps Poland Build,” Op-Ed Page, Nov. 2O). The lady suffers the “clucking hen syndrome,” a term used to describe boring repetition of facts that are common knowledge.

What Kirkpatrick and many of her fellow crusaders fail to recognize is the present momentous events in Europe point to something more than the fall of communism. That system, ill-conceived from the start, has been bankrupted by the growth within it of a vast bureaucracy that germinated an elite caste never contemplated or envisioned by Marx or Lenin.

It is obvious to any impartial observer of current U.S. affairs that a similar problem is staring us in the face. Elitism and the evils that go hand-in-hand with it (greed, fraud, corruption in high places) are biting gradually into the fiber of American society. Ms. Kirkpatrick is oblivious to it all, thus ignoring one of the great lessons of history--that the widening of divisions between the privileged and the underprivileged in any society leads inexorably to revolution. We should hesitate to wallow in the downfall of any system of government until we put our own house in order.

LEO NEALON

Huntington Beach