Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE One on Five Good God! After printing—presumably with his eyes open—an attack on Pat Buchanan in TAS, David Frum has the gall to act shocked when he's deluged with furious and...
...Or have they all just been reading Parliament of Whores...
...Daniel Wattenberg replies: What's with all this quasi-scatological imagery—"nauseating," "spreading his legs," "drooling"—and all these initials—TAS, RET, P.O.W., PJO, SD...
...Martin Morse Wooster Silver Spring, Maryland Tell P. J. O'Rourke not to shoot cats...
...Tyrrell, in regards to my school, Rice University, you have done me wrong...
...Really, though, the last straw is P. J.'s statement that rightists should shoot cats because they're viciously selfish and because liberals like them...
...and while there's less of this in P.O.W...
...that it's absurd to call O'Rourke a "racist...
...What a genius was this Darwin and how easily satisfied the curiosity of this Moomaw...
...ITS SI7E...
...Darwinism says simply that some mutations either live longer in a given environment and so make more copies of themselves than their ancestors, or move well into new environments: and that the natural result of this is a strong (but not ubiquitous) tendency toward more complex living things (including more intelligent animals), given the obvious usefulness of greater complexity in surviving both environmental changes and the actions of live enemies...
...As a moderate, I'm quite fond of cats: a great many of them aren't the selfish little bastards of legend (certainly less so than RET and P. J...
...I conclude the Moomaw letter was written by a cat...
...Because Wilson's recent study of 2,490 residents of Chicago's inner-city neighborhoods found that, while you may doubt the relationship between values and urban poverty, inner-city residents themselves do not...
...Liberal Dogs and Conservative Cats While P. J. O'Rourke's annual Enemies List was entertaining ("Commies—Dead but Too Dumb to Lie Down," TAS, November 1991), he makes a critical mistake when he places cats on the enemies list...
...Podles's way of "protecting himself from reality," his own engagement in the "folly of building shells as protection from pain...
...I KEEP THEM TO REREAD...
...In this article, you seemed to refer to Rice as "one of the less prestigious universities" and one of the "cow colleges...
...Finally, one would hope that Mr...
...Podles is in better shape than "that cripple and weakling Nietzsche" (as he calls him...
...But I don't hear Mr...
...PART OF ITS CHARACIER...
...Consider, say, his statement that military waste isn't a serious problem because: "The best argument against cutting defense spending cannot be put into words...
...Cats are right-wing animals...
...I also nominate Ted Turner for probationary removal from the Enemies List, on the grounds that CNN's coverage of the war more than anything else strengthened the public's certainty that television journalists have the patriotism of turkey buzzards as well as a similar mode of earning a living...
...The outrage is in the blatant openness of the groups opposing the franchise...
...Dogs, by contrast, are liberals...
...Well...
...Our university has long been considered one of the finer universities in this nation, and has won more than its fair share of accolades...
...PLEASE CONSIDER THIS A FRIENDLY, FERVENT BUT ADAMANT PROTEST...
...Yeltsin closed down Pravda at that point...
...Podles states that "the bodybuilder, with his bulging biceps and starved waist, is to the normal athletic male body what Pontormo is to Raphael...
...However, oh well, that's life...
...There it is written, that when Petah heard of the assassination of President Kennedy, he "wretched and sobbed on the floor...
...Podles can validate this point by reading a copy of the National Strength and Conditioning Association Journal...
...Many men and women have taken up bodybuilding for physical therapy after surgery or illness...
...And then there is the matter of the correspondent's supposed last name...
...I was sorry that two children had been bereft of their father, and I was sorry that an act of violence had defiled our history...
...News & World Report, or I guess USNWR, repeated follow-up interviews by Wilson's team of ethnographers showed that inner-city blacks who hold jobs often doubt that unemployed ghetto residents are truly committed to finding work or supporting their children...
...In fact, ever since it ceased to be the official organ of the Soviet Writers' Union, it seems to lack a permanent printshop...
...Shooting other people's livestock is something I frown on, and when it's my livestock I take a very dim view indeed...
...How long, 0 Lord...
...and, unlike dogs, RET and P. J., they don't continually drool all over you while insisting that you admire them...
...C.R...
...Lenina izdatelstva TsK KPSS "Pravda," 125865, GSP, Moskva, A-137, ul...
...And so they get more and more complex over the eons...
...They are independent and self-reliant creatures...
...George Mitrovich, president of the City Club of San Diego...
...It is therefore particularly hard for me to understand how she could make the following statement: ". . . it still has to resort to the services of a government-owned printshop—that of Literaturnaya Gazeta...
...Publisher, Pressage & Ct Cleveland Heights, Ohio Pump It Up It is obvious that prodigal son Sam Fussell had to write an apologia for his failure at competitive bodybuilding in order to return to the literary fold of his father Paul...
...Of course, this shop had at that time a lot of open capacity, since Mr...
...Really, Mr...
...Observe wealthy liberal women in Bloomfield Hills or Beverly Hills...
...They give affection in return for services rendered...
...IS PART OF ITS BEING UNIQUE...
...After printing—presumably with his eyes open—an attack on Pat Buchanan in TAS, David Frum has the gall to act shocked when he's deluged with furious and incoherent letters, and to gasp with horror at his discovery that the U.S...
...Unfortunately, even when he's trying to be sincere, he's equally repulsive...
...That's all, folks...
...He is wrong about their personalities...
...Ted Willi Athens, Georgia Lover Come Back I DO NOT THROW AWAY OLD ISSUES OF TAS...
...Are Chicago's inner-city residents "pandering to racism...
...The eye-bulging and foaming pure ultra-rightism he peddles for TAS's weirder fans is not, shall we delicately say, the same commodity he's pushing in other magazines (speak up, Hunter and Dave...
...I think not...
...It's visceral, hormonal...
...I refer to the November issue, p. 45, pertaining to the review of the biography of Peter Lawford...
...As far as bodybuilding being full of "narcissistic and effeminate" males and homosexuals, as Podles suggests, let me point out that bodybuilders, like other athletes, comprise a cross section of the population—some model citizens, others not...
...Well, says Darwin, they just did come into existence with the capacity to leave offspring...
...Anyone with such an apparent need to slander has little inner strength and would never come close to enduring the years of illness and philosophical questing that Nietzsche did...
...Tom Bethell replies: Living organisms are so complicated that scientists often don't know how to repair them when they break down, don't understand the cause of aging, and certainly don't know how to manufacture duplicates in laboratories...
...The stationery reeks of tuna...
...You cited William Julius Wilson in support of your view that inner-city poverty is mainly due to structural problems...
...They do not walk their cats (cats are perfectly capable of walking themselves...
...Which brings me to my first topic: Dan Wattenberg's bizarre September admiration for the latest work by TAS's second most prominent childish thug...
...33 (5359) was printed at Tipografiya imeni V.I...
...Mitrovich...
...There may—perhaps—be valid arguments against Darwinism based on the frequency with which beneficial mutations turn up, but this piece of drivel is not among them...
...Why, just lately, U.S...
...than in his earlier books, there's still plenty...
...But, Mr...
...They quickly become accustomed to cut-up pork chops instead of the dry cat food you used to feed them...
...Joel Nelson Madison, South Dakota 82 The American Spectator January 1992...
...Competitive bodybuilding doesn't have a monopoly on steroid use, which is epidemic among athletes in almost every sport...
...Perhaps you were thinking of Texas A&M...
...Nothing died in me, Mr...
...Thus in the May 8, 1991 issue No...
...Certainly the right should retain their vigilance against overly cute cat books...
...it's much more accurate to say that he's willing to pander to racism whenever there's a buck to be made in it...
...He says that when Kennedy died, something died in all of us...
...Still, Bethell's bonnetbug on this subject does serve one useful purpose: it cuts down on the number of his political columns-and, after you've listened to bird-brained apologies for David Duke, Murrayesque diatribes about S.D...
...University trustees, henpecked by the campus Women's Center and cowed into proper submission by campus homosexual groups, refused to allow Carl's Jr., a fast-food franchise, from coming to campus because of the founder's pro-choice views and opposition to the pro-homosexual agenda...
...They have a fine eye for a soft touch, love luxury, and reward their patrons (of whatever stripe) with contented purrs, shielded claws, and discreet brushings against the pantleg or nylons...
...as the best policy toward the poor, and hysterical pantings about the horror of not allowing gays to be persecuted, this can look like a pretty big benefit...
...News & World Report named us the fifteenth best university in the nation (ahead of such venerable schools as Brown and the University of Virginia), and Money magazine rates us the number one buy in American education...
...Now, if he'd come out for shooting parrots, no problem...
...As an ex-liberal and chairman of my school's College Republican club, I find The American Spectator a good reminder of why I left the left...
...18 (5344) the printer was listed as Tipografiya IPO SP SSSR, 103662 Moskva K-51, Tsvetnoi bulvar, 30, whereas the August 21, 1991 (what a glorious date...
...Podles groups bodybuilding, a constructive activity, with such "dangers" as "crime, drugs, skydiving, risky sex...
...I have yet to meet a parrot that didn't show clear evidence of demonic possession...
...Whatever liabilities bodybuilding has in particular cases (such as Fussell's own), these are the types of liabilities all sports have at the professional level when money and career make it attractive to win at any cost, even if it means using steroids...
...Others enjoy weight-training as a healthy and vigorous recreation to counterbalance a sedentary office job...
...Pravdy," 24...
...They are servile worshippers of authority...
...is filled with rightists driven by "hate" rather than by "conviction...
...What's 14 The American Spectator January 1992 going on...
...How sad...
...He has, after all, made an entire career out of nauseating his readers with his belief that it's charming to be viciously selfish...
...Exactly what the hell did he expect from RET's and P. J.'s admirers...
...And, of course, there is George Will's kindly reference to Harvard as "the Rice of the Northeast" in a column he wrote about our school a few years ago...
...Since his whole life was wretched, I doubt it not...
...While I am at the keyboard, let me repudiate the letter of Mr...
...At any rate, you owe us a Texas-sized apology...
...I've got five dollars on him...
...Surely it's possible even for a TAS regular to understand this, and to understand that there's no contradiction between Stephen Gould believing this and his not believing in "progress" (by which, as Gould has always made perfectly clear, he means the belief that humans are becoming more moral and that there's no danger that our own intelligence will end up destroyingus...
...It is that excitement in the gut, the swelling of the chest, the involuntary smile that comes across the face of every male when he has a weapon to hand...
...According to U.S...
...It's a delicious irony that his breakthrough book is entitled Parliament of Whores, given the enthusiasm with which P. J. spreads his own journalistic legs...
...Please cancel my subscription...
...The point is that practically all printing facilities were in the hands of the party and the independent press (and Literaturnaya Gazeta was certainly one of the newly independent papers) were at the mercy of those who controlled such facilities and paper...
...Rich Stasiak Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin Miranda Writes RET's article, "A Bizarre Province" (TAS, November 1991), which detailed the politically correct weirdness on college campuses, missed the West Coast censorship at California State University, Northridge...
...250 OR 50g OR A DOLLAR AND KEEP THAT DISTINCTIVE DIMENSION...
...They are independent entrepreneurs, and the leftists do not realize that this is what they are harboring...
...Football and track stars like Lyle Alzado and Ben Johnson are representative...
...A view that I prefer to brighten up with a muzzle flash...
...But I doubt it...
...It's the pot calling the kettle black...
...To start with, I really like Cathy Young's writing...
...Those who contemplate shooting my cats, however, would be well advised to read this page's header closely ["I'm the NRA...
...That's all, folks...
...Tyrrell...
...They are a nice warm furry thing that greets you when you come home...
...The stamp and envelope flap are licked to tatters...
...I have no doubt that if cats could speak, they would be enthusiastic advocates of the Second Amendment...
...Claire Scoltock McMinnville, Oregon I profoundly enjoyed the re-education primer, especially the part about cigars...
...For the aforementioned reasons, it is not correct to call Literaturnaya Gazeta a semiofficial publication...
...Big mistake, Bruce...
...F. Ahlsen-Girard Orlando, Florida Last Straw Pat Buchanan has made "The Enemies List...
...but I was no more sorry to be rid of this incompetent and sexually debauched man than I was sorry to hear of the death of Franklin Roosevelt...
...COULDN'T YOU RAISE THE PRICE A BIT...
...Caroline Miranda North Hollywood, California Hasty Rice Pudding First of all, I must state that I truly enjoy reading your journal...
...How did they come into existence...
...Any investigation into prison rehabilitation programs will show that bodybuilding training, when made available to inmates, has a remarkable effect on morale, contributing to greater self-esteem and self-discipline—two traits essential for the successful return of former inmates to society...
...Ivan Bezugloff, Jr...
...Arnold Schwarzenegger and other top bodybuilders have led numerous workshops in men's and women's prisons with enthusiastic response from both inmates and prison officials...
...Philip Lewis Los Angeles, California Love the magazine, love it, love it, love it...
...Mitrovich needs to re-think his loyalty, which might have been excused in the 1960s, before the illusions foisted on the gullible American public regarding the Kennedy clan had been dispelled by factual evidence—not "revisionism...
...Furthermore, some organisms leave more offspring than others...
...I am sorry, but Literaturnaya Gazeta doesn't have a printshop of their own, and never had...
...And it should be every conservative's ambition to punch Garfield in the snot...
...But cats themselves are allies, not enemies, of the conservative movement...
...Maybe RET should go into biology, although I definitely wouldn't recommend sharing a lab with him...
...Mark R. Yzaguirre Rice University Houston, Texas You Bet Bill Casey had better show ("Casey's Final Mission," by Michael Ledeen, TAS, November 1991...
...Perhaps giving a good tongue-lashing is Mr...
...Next time you write a letter to the editor, keep in mind that references to bodily functions and over-reliance on initials are at all costs to be avoided by someone who bears the initials BM...
...issue No...
...PART OF WHAT SETS IT APART...
...I was quite impressed with her book, Growing Up in Moscow, and have always enjoyed her well-informed commentary on the happenings in Soviet Union...
...The shocker is that—as he repeatedly makes clear both in this piece and in several others—the lout actually believes this...
...Incidentally, I hope TAS readers noticed Murray's piece in the July 8 National Review, in which he backpedaled on his whole Losing Ground hypothesis and now agrees with Nick Lemann and William Julius Wilson—and with Frum and E. Fuller Torrey in the August 26 NR—that a good deal of the underclass's growth is due to the natural disappearance of low-skill jobs—although he and Frum then babble, for absolutely no convincing reason, that There Is Nothing Significant That Can Be Done About It...
...Try again, birdbrain...
...Professional or competitive bodybuilding consists of a relatively small group of athletes, especially when compared to the mammoth football, basketball, and baseball organizations...
...They constantly carry small disgusting dogs that are so primped, preened, and pedicured that they symbolize their owner's commitment to wasteful spending...
...They do seem to have a fondness for their patrons...
...Actually, come to think of it...
...But on to my second topic, which is the fact that—after fifteen years of frantic efforts by scientists to explain the obvious to him—Tom Bethell is still furiously "disproving" Darwinism with an argument so asinine that it can literally be seen through by the average fourth-grader with an interest in science: namely, that Darwinism says only that "survivors survive" and is therefore "meaningless...
...They constantly intrude in their owners' lives...
...WE LOVE YOU...
...In your November 1991 issue you referred to a case involving a Rice professor who ran afoul of the PC patrols...
...If they have their own interests at heart, who's to blame them...
...ASIDE FROM TAS'S EXCELLENT WRITING AND ALWAYS RELEVANT CONTENT...
...Regardless of these artists' respective visions, the "normal athletic male body" today is a product of bodybuilding training, or progressive-resistance weight-training, which is advocated by most coaches and trainers in the sporting world...
...Moreover, every cat is equipped with a highly effective personal-defense system in its claws...
...I PROTEST THE ODIOUS IDEA TO DIMINISH THE SIZE OF TAS...
...Students are prevented from buying at a restaurant of their choice because a small group of wailing left-wing censors won't let them...
...Cow college," sir...
...Podles making wholesale condemnations of those sports...
...Bruce Moomaw Cameron Park, California P. J. O'Rourke replies: I have examined the evidence...
...Think I'll shed a tear over the passing of the tabloid size come January...
...What is not so clear is the motivation behind Leon Podles's stereotypical and venomous appraisal of bodybuilders in his review of Fussell's Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder (TAS, October 1991...
...Dick Hazelett Colchester, Vermont (continued on page 82)CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 16) Class Stegall Rare indeed to capture The American Spectator in a misspelling, but I congratulate you—when you do it, it still makes sense...
...I will agree with D.W...
...In fact, their criticisms of neighbors and friends were so harsh that if white scholars or black conservatives made the same assertions, they would most likely be branded as racists or Uncle Toms...
...Stegall HumanitieslReligion Florida Junior College at Jacksonville Jacksonville, Florida Hold Your Horses I am writing about some statements inCathy Young's article "Growing Pains" in the September issue of your excellent journal...
...Similarly, Wattenberg doesn't utter a word about O'Rourke's approving statement that God "has little apparent concern for the material well-being of the disadvantaged," and that we should copy him—which makes it unsurprising that PJO ecstatically embraces Charles Murray's idiot belief that the best possible alternative to current poverty programs is pure Social Darwinism, as opposed to, say, a workfare program...
Vol. 25 • January 1992 • No. 1
