To the Editor:

I must protest. John Hood owes English speaking people a profound apology. If the chairman of the John Locke Foundation is an example of American education then the lunatics are in deed in charge of the asylum.

Hood writes: In 1653 an Anglican clergyman named William Lee…..

As an author, Hood may have detailed knowledge of the Reverend William Lee, but as some one who left Hastings Grammar School in 1956, three years after the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, I know because of our school song that by 1605 the first Elizabeth was dead and buried. In 1653, Oliver Cromwell was the dominant man in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

If in 1659, as John Hood alleges William Lee took his knitting machine to London to show the English monarch his invention, then he was too late to meet the Lord Protector. You see, Cromwell was six feet under and was not dug up until after the restoration and Lee was too soon for the coronation of Charles II.

The speech which Hood ascribes to Queen Elizabeth I is the figment of Hood’s fertile imagination and his poverty stricken knowledge. It is not Queen Elizabeth’s economic illiteracy that is in question, but Hook’s historical, perhaps I mean hysterical, knowledge.

The idea that William Lee met Queen Elizabeth in 1659 is not an idea that should be allowed free flow in today’s America. The thought, let alone the alleged transcript, is patently absurd.

I have no wish to stop John Hood from writing his weekly submissions that appear in my News-Herald, but everyone should be aware that the Chairman of the John Locke Foundation (is this any relation to the Clinton Foundation??) is perhaps incapable of following an historical time line.

Gerald Harvey

Murfreesboro