After delivering the Encyclopaedia Britannica lecture early in 1974, Ivan Illich has been identified with the paradoxical thesis that "the medical establishment has become a major threat to health." Central to his positjon then (later elaborated in his Medical Nemesis) is the medical establishment's responsibility "for the individual's growing demand for institutional management of his pain." Pain, by becoming uhnecessary, has become unbearable. It seems eminently reasonable then "to eliminate pain, even at the cost of health." So we have become addicted to whatever ambrosia promises that god-like but essentially negative state of being—painlessness.

Do you remember telling me you couldn't possibly be an anti-Semite because as a child you played with adreidel, a familiar Chanukah game? 1 wonder if you—with your finely tuned Third World sensitivities—would have said to a black person who accused you of being a white racist that no, you couldn't be, because as a toddler you ate watermelon?

There is an awkwardness here. Your "certain young Christian radical" isn't me. My radicalism is a sometime thing. As Christian, I'm often aberrant. And I'm not so young: I was twenty-nine when Israel came to be. Still, I suppose an open letter can be answered by anyone interested. I feel especially eligible because many of the things you say here have been said to me.

On one level it seems that you and I have few grounds to quarrel. I know, for example, that anti-Semitism is real. Besides the classical Christian form and the modern racist version that you describe, I'll suggest a third—the corporate, petroleum-fueled variety.

One of the foremost analysts of contemporary religion recently gave vent to his exasperation with people who criticize ecumenical organizations such as the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches. "Why do you even waste time commenting on those groups? Don't you know that nobody cares about what those relics do? Certainly their pronouncements have nothing to do with what's really happening in the churches." This private expression, it should be noted, comes from one solidly located in the "liberal mainstream" of American Protestantism. Let the record show that he supports these ecumenical agencies wholeheartedly. It is just that he is totally indifferent to them. The simple truth, he says, is that they no longer matter very much.

The main problem in Southeast Asia is economic development, a problem the United States and Japan are largely responsible for. Southeast Asia, the U.S., and Japan are all involved, therefore, in determining how to achieve economic viability in Southeast Asia—where a new era of peaceful coexistence has begun after decades of war.

Leaders in Southeast Asian countries, including the Socialist states in Indochina, agree that the most pressing problem is how to overcoihe extreme hardships and difficulties in order to achieve economic and social development.

If there was a single development that stbod out among everything that transpired in Asia in 1975 it was the capitulation of South Vietnam to a pro-Communist regime. The "fall" of Vietnam holds implications that extend far beyond contemporary Southeast Asia;it was an event that perfectly symbolized the play-out in Asia of the entire history of postwar politics. Regardless of how one may judge the war in Vietnam itself, or the whole issue of Indochina, for that matter, to overlook the wider significance of what culminated in 1975 is to lose one's grip on any real understanding of what the Vietnam war meant.

With the coming of Jimmy Carter something ended, and something else began. As if to celebrate—however sadly—the end of an age, more than eight hundred surviving members of Roosevelt's New Deal recently gathered in Washington for a party. "We didn't want to wait another year," said one of the organizers of the occasion, "because some of these people won't be here then".