WE ARE ALL DETROITERS

MATT LABASH'S portrait of Detroit ("The City Where the Sirens Never Sleep," December 29) was poignant and sympathetic. He wanted to write about a panoply of unique individuals and succeeded.

Nevertheless, there is a larger issue in Detroit's decline which is clear from the story but never stated; the assumptions and practices of modern welfare-state liberalism have provided ongoing palliatives to Detroit while driving the pathologies that have condemned it to a downward spiral into complete dysfunction.

Detroit desperately needs a Thatcher, and the turn in public sentiment to support her. But from whence and from what political base are they to come?

PAUL J. ISAAC
Larchmont, N.Y.

AS A DETROITER, I have to say this was a beautiful article. Matt Labash was cruel, but spot-on.

My only complaint is that he provided no context for Saddam Hussein's getting the key to the city. For people not familiar with America's history with Saddam, it might look like Detroit supports terrorists, which is not the case.

Saddam was given the key to the city in 1980 when Iraq was a U.S. ally and partner opposed to Iranian hegemony. He donated something like half a million dollars to a Chaldean church in the city. ERIC DENNIS
Ann Arbor, Mich.

MATT LABASH'S sober, devastating piece on Detroit is a journalistic triumph-sympathetic, graphic, sprinkled with telling quotations and photos-and utterly nonideological. Which may be just what we need now, after the election, when Americans are starting to realize that, one way or another, everyone's a Detroiter.

THOMAS L. JEFFERS
Milwaukee, Wis.

REPORTERS ON STRIKE

REGARDING THE AP byline strike ("Reporters in Extremis," December 29), the SCRAPBOOK is quite right that only a reporter's mother cares about names on wire copy. But that's not the point.

During my 18 years with United Press International, a byline meant that UPI had a reporter on the scene-as opposed to having a reporter from a newspaper phoning in notes, or some other "stringer" filing information to the nearest wire service bureau. Obviously, we could not staff all the hundreds of stories that moved on the wires every day, and many of them were pickups from other media, rewritten press releases, or other nonstaff work.

Newspapers, of course, routinely knock a wire service reporter's byline off of a story, before hacking it to fit an ever-shrinking news hole. Very often, the byline on a story was (and I'm sure still is) the name of the reporter on the scene, not the one who wrote it. The story might have been compiled in Atlanta or Dallas or New York from many sources at the scene, written, polished, and edited by a senior desk editor who is a former field reporter and (still) often a skilled wordsmith.

So with their byline strike, the AP reporters are not depriving us of the knowledge that Scoop Hotguy wrote the story, but that ol' Scoop was at the train wreck or news conference-rather than coming from an AP bureau that got a call from a corporate flack or country radio station's mobile news van.

BILL COTTERELL
Tallahassee, Fla.

GREAT BOOKS SIGHTING

AFTER READING CHRISTINE ROSEN'S and Tracy Lee Simmons's articles on the Great Books in your December 22 issue ("When Books Were Great" and "Great Books Redux"), I felt compelled to share the fact that not only is there another college in the land that believes it is more important to know how to think than what to think, but it immerses its students in the history of the times in which the great thinkers wrote. I am a newly minted freshman at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., where every incoming freshman follows a year-and-a-half-long series of courses known as the "Search for Values in Western Civilization and Religion," known at its inception simply as the "Man" (history of mankind) course. I am a changed person after my first semester of studying the Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle and Plato's Republic. Not only that, but every one of my classmates, if he gave the course any attention at all, is changed as well, and we go forward in our four-year journey with the same foundation from which to grow as students of the meaning of life and what constitutes a good life. It is the reason I chose my college, and although I was lost, befuddled, and frustrated many times while deciphering the words of Plato, I have not been disappointed. There are absolute truths in this world, and Plato and Aristotle explain why this is important to know in order to be happy.

JORDAN HARMS
Mill Valley, Calif.