Reality check or pat on back for Bacharach?

CAN’T wait to hear Burt Bacharach’s new record [“What His World Needs Now,” by Geoff Boucher, Oct. 22]. Just imagine if he’d been around in the run-up to World War II to “speak truth to power,” the tunes he might have written with Neville Chamberlain as his lyricist. I can hear it now: “Peace in Our Time.” “Give Appeasement a Chance.” “What the World Needs Now Is National Socialism.” You get the picture.

Naivete can be forgiven in the young, whose knowledge of history doesn’t extend to the pre-MTV era. Such willful blindness in those who should know better when confronting the most monstrous evil of our time would seem humorous if it weren’t so dangerous. There’s no fool like an old fool.

STEPHEN QUINN

Huntington Beach

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SO the Burt Bacharach/Hal David song “Say a Little Prayer” wasn’t exactly “high-definition rhetoric” in 1967, but for those of us with men in Vietnam (my husband was a pilot flying close air support for our ground troops), the message was loud and clear. Dionne Warwick’s comment that “we were sending a message to our kids in Vietnam” met with this comment from your reporter, “Who knew?” Well, I knew, and I’m sure I wasn’t alone. Thank you, Messrs. Bacharach and David.

MARY ANN PHILLIPS

Calabasas