Robert Bork

Conservative Robert Bork, in a commentary (Oct. 10) whining about our “hedonist individualism,” says that restoring the “better aspects of the 1950s” would be “cause for rejoicing.”

I’ll say! In those postwar years, the United States enjoyed unparalleled prestige and almost unlimited access to the resources of the known world.

Driving all this work and dedication to duty was a socialist government that plied the country with expansive programs of transportation, communications, highways, schools and science. Because the leaders of industry were bent on keeping the country on a super-inflated wartime economy, the government had to fabricate the myth of the “Red Menace,” which kept taxes at an all-time high and rewarded us with the threat of global nuclear annihilation.

The 1950s were hardly an era of good feeling and family values, but was a tyrannical era, when most Americans were trying to recover from a horrible war and preparing for an unthinkable one. It was a time of conserving the status quo at all costs, including the enforcement of racial segregation in both North and South. It was a time of deep psychosis and trauma from which we still have not emerged.

WILLIAM H. DuBAY

Costa Mesa

Bork’s tirade against liberalism points out a fact for which we should all be grateful: This pompous, holier-than-thou, self-righteous ideologue is not sitting on the Supreme Court.

ALLAN RABINOWITZ

Los Angeles

Bork misses the point. Religious conservatives are authoritarian. They hold fast to the notion that we operate according to the laws of an unseen alien despot, and that these laws are not subject to amendment or rescission by man. Religionists believe that laws and ethics developed by the people for the people are inferior and subordinate to mythical cosmic absolutes. Such thinking is contrary to democracy, antithetical to human progress and outright un-American.

The radical right continues to use its taxpayer-subsidized institutions to indoctrinate minions into its quixotic battle against such dastardly bastions of enlightenment as the media, the arts and our educational system. All (gasp!) liberal institutions that might confuse people with truth and knowledge and other ungodly evils.

BRIAN BOBO

Los Angeles