Taking Issue With Khachigian

* There he goes again, Kenneth L. Khachigian beating his drum for school vouchers, and using Ted Turner’s philanthropy as his starting point (Sept. 28). Khachigian should have read The Times’ Opinion section of the same date, “At Times, the Problem is Economic, Not Racism,” by Jose Novoa.

Novoa makes the point that “deindustrialization has impoverished inner cities” and that “attacks on the ‘liberal interventionist state,’ coupled with the resegregation of the country through ‘white flight’ to the suburbs, have allowed middle-class white voters to tax themselves to pay for direct services while shielding their tax dollars from federal programs that might be used for urban renewal or to help poor people of color.” And, I would add, to fund inner-city schools. Khachigian would make up for this neglect by granting $2,000 scholarships “to allow 50,000 kids to escape the clutches of government school educrats.”

No matter whether these are scholarships or government vouchers, what will matter is that there are not enough of them to serve the many millions of kids who have been left behind in the poorer schools. It would still depend upon private schools to accept these “left-behind” kids, to transport them to the usually suburban locations and to see that they are not discriminated against by their more well-off classmates. Khachigian, you dreamer!

LEE PODOLAK

Orange

* I hold many conservative views, but Khachigian is getting boring with his mindless attacks on any act or person he perceives as liberal. Now, he’s trying to demean Ted Turner’s billion-dollar donation to the United Nations as if there’s something hypocritical or un-American about it because he didn’t spend it on the needy in the United States.

I, too, might have preferred he spend it in the U.S., but no matter how you slice it, in the final analysis Turner performed a charitable deed. Perhaps that’s how he conceived to help create a better world.

If Khachigian is so concerned about U.S. money being spent abroad, why doesn’t he talk about our multinational corporations making huge investments and creating jobs abroad--investments that our military must be prepared to defend at the expense of American lives and taxpayer dollars?

Khachigian portrays Turner’s description of Oseola McCarty as “the little colored lady-washer” as a racial crudity. That’s more of Khachigian’s self-serving venom. I think almost any fair-minded person would conclude that Turner was impressed, if not motivated by this exceptional woman who donated her $150,000 life savings to finance scholarships. Where is there any disrespect or racial crudity in this? What this world needs is more Ted Turners who are inspired by good deeds and fewer Ken Khachigians who would trash them for it.

PHILIP CUTLER

Costa Mesa

* The comments on Ted Turner reveal dumb and nasty streaks in Khachigian. Will someone explain how Jane Fonda of all people can be “owned” by Turner? And how can Turner’s laudatory comment on “the little colored lady . . .” benefactor in any stretch be considered ugly and demeaning except by the most unreconstructed practitioner of political correctness? If “people of color” is good, then “colored” is just fine--and less cumbersome. Language fashion should not intimidate.

More importantly, what is his quibble about Turner’s gift of $1 billion to the United Nations? Part of Turner’s motivation, so he says, is to consider this gift like seed money to motivate other big givers who will then donate to other good causes, including inner-city education. It seems to me there are opposite poles in virtue and good sense between a gift to the UN and gifts such as those of Irving I. Moskowitz promoting Israeli Jews moving into Arab neighborhoods. In my view, one we should praise. The other, we should openly condemn.

NEIL PINNEY

Laguna Beach

* Is there something eerie about Kenneth Khachigian, that exemplar of Republican conservatism, telling Ted Turner how he should spend his money? Or is this just a right-wing form of situational ethics?

DONALD SCHWARTZ

Santa Ana