Of Kirk, Snell, Hilary, Rutherford and editorial

For the first time in my year long acquaintance with your editorials you wrote something that was half-way to being sensible and intelligent. I refer to the editorial September 18 on Norman Kirk. I agree that a clear-sighted view of the man including his warts was needed to balance the eulogies in every other magazine and newspaper I have read. I think it was perhaps excusable that everyone praised him to the heavens at the time of shock at his death. However a few weeks after the event it was refreshing to see some reaction against [unclear: tur....] him into a cult hero. Admittedly we have no gods except for Snell and Hilary. John A. Lee is too cheeky and unfortunately too alive for the shrine founders, who probably rejoiced at Baxter's death which enabled them to make him a Christ figure without his protests. Katherine Mansfield is too esoteric as well as being an expatriate and not a good clean Kiwi girl. Rutherford's atoms are becoming disreputable. Let us not put our only recent statesman to die in office on a USA Kennedy pedastal, and be indignant if Ruth Kirk marries the equivalent of Onassis, thus defying the law of modern suttee for the widow of a dead hero. I know the "Women's Weekly" lost the Lawson quins on their mother's divorce, but it does not need to create another Royal Family for NZ.

This week's editorial was also surprising There are no new arguments for or against abortion, but you wrote a reasonable summary of both, with the minimum of your usual jargon. In fact it was almost literate.

I am writing this letter (my first to Salient) as an apology for all the times I have groaned "That fuckwit editor, couldn't write something intelligent in readable English, without gobbledy gook cliches, or jargon, if he tried". You have shown that you are not completely incapable of such a task.

R. Bell.