CHIPS THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT

Nina J. Easton’s examination of the precarious relationship between “reluctant warrior” Jack Valenti and the V-chip crusaders is a lucid, finely crafted treatise on the sordid nature of paternalistic government and interest-group politics (“He Knows What You Want,” Oct. 20). Even more strikingly, Easton demonstrates the outright absurdity of Valenti’s election as arbiter of this cultural dispute.

The genesis of the V-chip imbroglio is this: It is what free-market-oriented economists call the “tragedy of the commons”--that is, the intractable and vicious conflicts that arise when a given resource, such as television, is “publicly” owned, controlled or supervised.

The solution to the V-chip debacle, as with all other such debacles: de-politicize it. Tell the interest groups to take a hike, scrap the V-chip, and instruct the FCC that its one-size-fits-all (thus, nobody), something-for-everyone, freedom-for-no-one approach is unconstitutional and un-American. We must leave such matters to the discretion and good moral sense of individual Americans.

Nicholas Eric Spinner

Los Angeles

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Every day, each of us is surrounded by so many forms of communication that there is now way to escape aoo of them--no way to prevent information from being received.

We are besieged by hand-held TVs and radios, telephone calls, printed matter and billboards, T-shirts, bumper stickers, mailings, pamphlets, schoolyard conversations and online everything.

Virtually every day, and from all media, we hear news of murders, rapes, kidnappings, celebrity embarrassments, disasters, wars, bombings, beatings and other goodies.

At exactly what age are children considered ready to hear about such things? Any time apparently is the right time, because receiving information comes with the territory, practically from birth. It is a Niagara Falls flow of information that tends to drown any and all kinds of protective chips, or classifications, in its path.

Truly effective insulation from today’s world of engulfing communication would have to mean no radio, no television, no printed media, no computers, no Webs, no telephones--perhaps even no conversation among people. That simply isn’t going to happen.

And it’s a good bet that our clever kids will manage to outwit any device that’s designed to blind them.

Julian Myers

Century City

Considering that the current motion picture code is an immoral shambles wouldn’t having Valenti generate a television code be akin to leaving a goat to guard the cabbage?

Daniel P. Cunningham

Lancaster