Too many letters from cranks
To the editor: Thirty years ago, Carl Pfluger wrote a great essay, “On Cranks.” If one submits more than four letters per year to the editor of one’s local newspaper, chances are, one is a crank. Here are a few takes from Pfluger’s essay: “A crank is a man possessed by a rampant idea… Anyone may have ideas, but a crank’s idea has him… We recognize a crank not by the content of his thought but by its style… I suspect that most people, on hearing a man described as a crank, cannot help making some association with the ubiquitous machine of the same name. We have, ...