Although I very much appreciate your main leader on the demise of the intellectual, which focuses on Alexander Solzhenitsyn (“Speaking Truth to Power,” August 9, 2008), I am concerned about your glaring blind spots. Mind you, I will not complain here that Solzhenitsyn was hardly an intellectual, and thus not an appropriate focus for your leader. Dissidents like him were witnesses of monstrosities that had to be brought out in the open, but they offered little by way of what had to be done. The blind spots that concern me most have to do with unbridled capitalism and its main exponent—the United States of America. This is the crux of the problem of democracy, which you briefly discuss only to leave the reader even more perplexed. As you say, democracies produce a cacophony, but the main problem of our age is that there are few or no voices pointing at the consequences of capitalism without limits or borders and raw American power projected to every corner of the earth. This is where the demise of the intellectual is most damaging. Put differently, this is where the cacophony can be best understood as a capitalist subterfuge calculated to squash all resistance by bewildering all thought.