Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Never on Sunday Torn Bethell, in "Darwin in the Dock" (TAS, June 1992), flatteringly says that I am one of three (with Bill Bennetta and Kevin Padian) who are "passionately...
...If I chewed tobacco, and I came into a restaurant and spit into your water glass The American Spectator August 1992 11 programs they administer have had on our economy and freedoms, it is not at all hyperbolic to say that we should all be better off to award half of them full pay for staying home...
...Erwin Chargaff has said, "That in our day pygmies throw giant shadows only shows how late in the day it has become...
...I was not aware that I have been trying to stamp out impure thoughts in any areas...
...We are annoyed by the smoker's insistence on the quiet enjoyment of his habit, at the expense of our quiet enjoyment of an expensive restaurant meal, airline transportation, or any of a variety of other endeavors during which we may be involuntarily seated near him...
...Thomas J. Calpin Morrisville, Pennsylvania Nobody Knows My Name I was proud to be quoted in Michael Fumento's recent article on fetal tissue transplantation ("Fetal Attraction," TAS, July 1992...
...Many thanks as well to Don Staricka, who has my vote for anything he wants to run for...
...We might consider paying bonuses to those who successfully dismantle old legislation...
...John M. Turnbow, MD...
...I am a loyal conservative reader who is female, and who believes absolutely in women's reproductive self-determination (read: pro-choice...
...Of all publications, TAS ought to recognize that smoking is an intrusive act that should be subject to the same kind of civilized constraints as there are on those who, say, wish to swing their fists...
...But for Mr...
...I fail to see the logical difference...
...Steinem gains an illusion of freedom...
...In which case, Mr...
...On that basis, I'm prepared to quibble and niggle: okay, only 85 percent of salary, plus fringes, plus pension at retirement age...
...You see, Mr...
...Seem excessive...
...Thatcher and her mighty men were more concerned with the fact that the Argentines were Latin and perceived to be Catholic...
...We are annoyed by the noxious fumes that we often cannot avoid in public places...
...O'Rourke's Enemies List), be assured that if Mr...
...Don't worry...
...Tama Starr (author, The "Natural Inferiority" of Women) New York, New York Currents of Wisdom I read the May 1992 installment of "Current Wisdom" with special interest...
...Lubbock, Texas or onto your plate, the management would at the very least ask me to leave...
...In blunter terms, the baseball evangelist Billy Sunday said the same thing as Johnson sixty-seven years ago: "The consensus of scholarship can go to hell for all I care...
...If we paid them only for constructive (or, at least, innocuous) activities, they would, in time, learn to behave in a socially responsible manner...
...He doesn't go far enough, however...
...Robert E. Harbaugh, M.D...
...They are intrinsically legitimate...
...If he is my neighbor and I persistently intrude upon his environment with the noise from my parties or my stereo, that is "disturbing the peace...
...There may be an unintentional double-entendre (Delta-Echo) in there somewhere...
...Bethell's final paragraph alleges that Johnson thanks God that his overtures for a judgeship in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals were turned down...
...And please don't take my word on this—ask other sufferers...
...Ledeen's central point...
...The hidden agenda, quite simply, is that smoking is profoundly annoying to non-smokers...
...We, too, are thankful that he is not a federal judge...
...I must, however, take exception to two errors...
...Stuart R. Ball Yukon, Oklahoma Common Cents Regarding the June 1992 American Spectator article, "Common Sense 1992": I'm not certain whether Michael Ledeen is pulling our leg...
...I would hesitate to attempt this...
...Joseph Bator Evanston, Illinois Not So Passive Christopher Caldwell's article on smoking ("Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," TAS, May 1992) is worthy of a certified first-class government bureaucrat, i.e., full of claims and supposedly sophisticated study results, but of course totally out of touch with the real world...
...It makes one wonder: Will the British never cease to hear the wind whistle in the sails of the Armada as it sweeps up the Channel...
...Get out of my bed, Dan Quayle...
...That's the origin of my proposal, and I rather suspect that if someone clever with numbers ran the calculations, we'd discover that the USA would be a net winner if we adopted the program...
...But, like so many other subjects that have become politicized, the EPA is reacting to smoking with a backlash mentality...
...Days spent crafting new legislation would go unrewarded, while photo ops with constituents and extended trade junkets to Malawi or Uzbekistan would earn them full pay...
...If John Calvin himself had been offered that deal, he'd have spent his life windsurfing on Lake Geneva...
...Here, finally, is a point on which we can agree with Johnson...
...Even President Carter has disclosed how difficult it is to prevent the intrusion of such fantasies...
...Martin Williamsburg, Virginia . . . As a scientist, I also oppose the use, quite common it seems, of factual data skillfully misinterpreted or incompletely reported to support the preconceived notions and biases of those who interpret or report them...
...Calvinistic angst...
...I am concerned about the liberal behavior of those who smoke publicly, in disregard of others' comfort...
...Don Staricka La Crescenta, California Michael Ledeen replies: I am grateful to Stephen Green for his thoughtful and witty remarks...
...Caldwell would experience only a day or so of the intense disabling sinus and head pain induced in some people by second-hand cigarette, cigar, or pipe smoke, he would then have all of the insight and qualifications—indeed, all the necessary inspiration—to write a refutation of his own article...
...It is true that you can cramp a legislator's style by slashing his staff budget and thereby save the nation billions ofdollars and unimaginable heartache...
...He reminds us that we revolutionaries mustn't lose our sense of humor, for it's one of our most effective weapons...
...Thus, the article "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" attracted my attention...
...That label is demanded by RET's conclusion in The Liberal Crack-Up (page 223) that, fundamentally, liberals feel "enjoined by high principle to disturb their neighbors...
...I don't have any love for the dictatorial fiats generated by the EPA, but I consider myself somewhat of a nonsmoking activist...
...It is hard for me to compute the percentage of hyperbole and that of "reality" in my proposal that we pay half the bureaucrats not to work, but he has grasped the serious intent, and I am happy to see that he agrees with it...
...Warren Wetmore Hazel Crest, Illinois 1588 and All That I would like to make a somewhat trivial (but interesting) comment on the review of William McGurn's Perfidious Albion by Stuart Reid in the June issue...
...Geoffrey Wolff may well indulge in instances of "smirky synonym-chasing" in A Day at the Beach: Recollections, but the example Christopher Caldwell cites in his June TAS review, "saying `tits-up' for 'belly-up,'" is not one...
...For Bethell to place Darwin in the dock, as some kind of prisoner, requires considerable temerity...
...I can tolerate Richard: it is a fine name...
...What better way to establish her own sense of worth than by stripping others of their selfworth—and making herself the agent of their recovery...
...Well, maybe—but I prefer to believe that Mrs...
...As an engineer, I have no respect for bad science either...
...He and his fellows were "on [their] knees in the fetal position" as Steinem "flailed away...
...In the federal bureaucracy...
...The imagery suggests a kind of pathology at work...
...In deference to the comment attributed to Stanton Glantz, our concerns need not be "legitimized...
...Reid attributes the robust defense of those rocks in the South Atlantic Ocean by Her Majesty's Forces to the fact that "the Falklanders were kith and kin...
...When I lived in Italy somebody calculated that there would be a net gain of $2-3 billion (dollars, not lire) if all the civil servants were paid but prevented from working...
...Going tits-up is in fact well-established, perfectly good, 100-percent clean-cut, all-white-scarf-and-a-yardwide American military aviatorese for an aircraft's rolling onto its back (often inadvertently...
...But this is purely negative reinforcement...
...The point is that the bureaucracy must be slashed, the power of government must be drastically reduced, and it is worth a lot to us to achieve this...
...Associate Professor of Neurosurgery Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center Lebanon, New Hampshire The American Spectator August 1992 63...
...For years they have been trying to stamp out impure thoughts in areas where religion and science show signs of overlapping...
...You see, if I persist in poking the smoker in the ribs with my index finger, that is an unconscionable intrusion upon his right to quiet enjoyment...
...The article 10 The American Spectator August 1992 begs the question, "What is the hidden agenda behind the insistence of those who abhor 'passive smoke...
...We should actively reward our senators and congressmen when they are on their good behavior...
...Why not leave the politicizing of sex to the feminists and other liberal "ists" who have done such a great job staking out that territory...
...Our bureaucracy is as bloated as Jaba the Hut, and if the electorate's unrealistic expectations of being aggrandized by federal programs were commensurately diminished, government could indeed be downsized by 50 percent, maybe much more...
...This thesis also fits the fact of the continued usurpation of Spanish Gibraltar in comparison to the equally weak-kneed response to Nasser at the Suez Canal...
...What illusion compensates the male feminist who joins in this exercise...
...My "passionate commitment" to the evolutionist cause is channeled mainly into the task of editing manuscripts for the Journal of Molecular Evolution: a job that calls for much reading and is arduous rather than passionate...
...Nobody invited you...
...I am not in the least concerned about contracting pulmonary adenocarcinoma by exposure to passive cigarette smoke...
...First, my name is Robert, not Richard...
...Is it possible that she is trying to exorciseher own private demons...
...Some such process appears to be one of the engines that drives feminism, although I prefer to think that it is not the only source...
...Stephen F. Green Eastford, Connecticut I thoroughly enjoyed Michael Ledeen's article and agree with his recommendations...
...Yet smokers seem to believe that they have the "right" to smoke anywhere and anytime that they please, without regard to anyone around them...
...He also continues TAS's misguided practice of belittling smoke sufferers and, while I would wish this affliction on no one (except maybe those on P.J...
...In short, it stinks...
...After all, the British myth of superiority to the "lesser breeds" must be upheld at all costs...
...This violent imagery, as pathetic as it is ridiculous, becomes his metaphor for liberation...
...Thus, a displaced 28year-old GS-12 making $40,000 per annum with five years on the job has a lifetime guarantee of not only his $40K per year but step increases, cost-of-living increases (each October 1), and full pension...
...Ledeen to suggest that we actually do so—rather than give them a realistic severance package and unemployment benefits like everyone else—smacks of an inside-the-Beltway Weltanschauung that seems to afflict conservatives as well as liberals...
...The 50 percent of the bureaucracy that would be sacked under his plan "will be guaranteed full salary (complete with step increases) until retirement age, and the pension [each worker] would have received had he continued in his job...
...Ledeen would pay them the difference between their former federal employment and the jobs most would...
...I demand satisfaction...
...Ledeen writes, most of the sacked federal troughers, "given the Calvinistic angst that drives most Americans," will choose to work and take a job that pays less than their former government posts...
...Please don't think that I miss or am unappreciative of Mr...
...CORRESPONDENCE Never on Sunday Torn Bethell, in "Darwin in the Dock" (TAS, June 1992), flatteringly says that I am one of three (with Bill Bennetta and Kevin Padian) who are "passionately committed to the evolutionist cause, and to naturalism in general...
...There are more of us quiet conservative believers in sexual self-determination than you could possibly imagine...
...He said, "There are many more of us quite conservative poofs than you could possibly imagine...
...Even for Steinem, it is a dangerous illusion since it allows her to evade any true self-knowledge...
...But if he persistently intrudes upon my enjoyment of a smokeless environment on an airplane, I am diminishing his "personal liberty" by objecting...
...Considering the deleterious effects interloping bureaucrats and the (continued on page 63) I think Christopher Caldwell missed the point...
...Your magazine is great except when someone goes off on an anti-abortion or "family values" rant...
...I usually skim the excerpts simply to savor the unintentional self-parody, but the selections from male feminists praising Gloria Steinem offer material worthy of further study...
...Old Darwin is in hell...
...We can give them all early retirement and save on fringe benefits for a few years, if you like...
...The tone of the comments from Bill Porterfield in particular suggests a type of sado-masochistic encounter...
...People who smoke seem to be a somewhat inconsiderate breed, at least as a group...
...Bethell quotes Johnson as blaming Darwinism for the "atheistic domination of intellectual life," which reminds me of the young soldier's mother who blamed the army for inventing sex...
...Show me an object of ridicule and I'll show you a loser...
...Don't you realize how many people are "conservative" precisely because we want the government out of our lives...
...What's Up...
...Perhaps Steinem does not intend to generate such a response, but in her recent autobiography she emphasizes her own lack of self-esteem...
...If, for the last ten years, smokers had taken their habit outside restaurants and other public places, the ecoidiots at the EPA would probably not be using pseudoscience to force the issue...
...You may question my description of this as "liberal behavior...
...subsequently take...
...Our more fastidious airpersons use the NATO phonetic alphabet to euphemize this unsettling occurrence as going Tango-Uniform...
...He then passed the collection plate...
...Thomas H. Jukes Professor of Biophysics University of California Berkeley, California Sexual Self-Determination I am emboldened to write by a letter you published in the June issue from a loyal reader who is a male homosexual, who wrote in to protest a gratuitous negative characterization of gays in your April issue...
...If only Bethell, Phillip Johnson, and others who proclaim incessantly that they don't believe in evolution would read the Journal of Molecular Evolution, they might learn something of a subject of which they have but little understanding...
...The smokers have none but each other to blame...
...Later, he referred to a series of wives who passed on the "billy club of rectitude...
...But calling a neurosurgeon a neurologist is like calling a fighter pilot a flight attendant...
...Second, I am an associate professor of neurosurgery, not neurology...
Vol. 25 • August 1992 • No. 8
