Kudos to veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer for lambasting the New York Times for its “paean” to Wal-Mart heir Alice Walton, and taking aim at Wal-Mart’s “systematic obliteration of thousands of family businesses and of course the creation of hundreds of thousands of sweatshop jobs.”

Safer’s letter (posted below) succintly captures the grand irony of Walton’s recent $35 million purchase of a famous landscape painting. (“All that Wal-Mart money was gleaned from the systematic destruction of the very American landscape Ms. Walton so expensively celebrates.”)

Here’s hoping that Safer’s hardhitting letter is the basis of a forthcoming 60 Minutes segment.

New York, May 14, 2005

To the Editor:

Your paean to Alice L. Walton, the Wal-Mart heir who recently purchased Asher B. Durand’s landscape painting “Kindred Spirits” for $35 million (“A Determined Heiress Plots an Art Collection,” Arts pages, May 14), ignored a grand inherent irony.

All that Wal-Mart money was gleaned from the systematic destruction of the very American landscape Ms. Walton so expensively celebrates. Not to mention the equally systematic obliteration of thousands of family businesses and of course the creation of hundreds of thousands of sweatshop jobs.

The robber barons of yore, through contrition or vanity, also established enduring cultural institutions, but surely in this age of alleged transparency, it behooves the newspaper of record to make at least passing reference to the human and environmental price we all pay to satisfy Ms. Walton’s ambition.

Morley Safer