Correspondence
looking Ahead Forty-eight hours after taking the oath of office, President Hillary Clinton will declare the entire staff of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR as "Enemy Combatants." Given this, you might...
...they are also the chief cause of the bottlenecks within the airline system...
...Far from it...
...d) killed time in St...
...Richard L. Leed Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus Cornell University A one-year (10-issue) subscription to The American Spectator costs $49 within the United States...
...George J. Boggs Collierville, Tennessee Waiting Room Gloom I was thumbing through the May/June 2002 issue at my doctor's office and happened upon "Freedom and Its Abuses" by Dinesh D'Sousa...
...The very reasonable response to these changes was to delay marriage and childbearing while getting more (and better) education...
...Edward Alexander Seattle, Washington Nixon's the One When I first started reading Albert Keith Whitaker's "The Nixon Generation" (TAS, June/July 2003), I was outraged that the only text that you had to back up your argument came from Tom Cruise via Hollywood...
...Why didn't he just catch a cab to downtown Minneapolis and take the next bus to St...
...The problem of deregulation is its incompleteness...
...Have you noticed how all preaching on sin, hell, damnation, punishment, even purgatory has disappeared since Vatican II...
...b) flew by jet to Appleton, Wisconsin, which is about three hundred miles in the wrong direction...
...George Neumayr's "Last Call" column in your June/July 2003 issue: Wow...
...Burkean) sense of the word—obedient to the church's teaching authority and to the unchanging primacy of "First Things" in the ordering of his life...
...but facts asserted in published letters should be checked...
...And I enjoy not watching the clock while I call them long distance...
...For air mail outside North America, add $40 for shipping/handling...
...At least one recent grad—and probably most of my classmates from the 2003 senior class at Thomas Aquinas College in California—knows to "do good and avoid evil...
...Brown asserts that "[Lincoln] could have cared less about the slaves...
...c) rode by car to St...
...How many deaths from highway accidents is Ben Stein willing to trade for reregulation and his own personal comfort...
...Even presidents and prime ministers abuse freedom when virtue loses all her loveliness...
...Peter Scarlet Tooele, Utah Regulating Ben Stein As a captain at Southwest Airlines, I take great umbrage at Mr...
...Box 1811, Newburgh, NY 12551, 800-524-3469...
...Jonathan Salmon St...
...Thanks to deregulation, more people fly and fewer die...
...Please keep up the good work and know that not all college kids have screwed up philosophies...
...In some dioceses priests who do bring up these uncomfortable subjects are censored...
...bankruptcy laws further weakens the industry and interferes with pricing to such an extent that viable alternatives to American and United are hard to create...
...He rightly paints a picture of a self-absorbed, unappreciative coed on one page, then indulges in the same crybaby complaining about the destruction of a once-great airline industry on the next...
...He is completely wrong when he says that Maryland was only kept in the Union by the illegal arrest of Maryland legislators—a favorite myth of neo-Confederate revisionists...
...Stein takes pains to describe the busboys, drivers, waitresses, and other ordinary Americans that he meets on his travels as the wonderful people that they obviously are...
...Cloud...
...Months later, in the fall 1861, several of the most blatant pro-Confederate legislators were indeed arrested for, among other things, raising money and recruiting troops for the Confederacy...
...Deregulation put competitive pressure on the giants, who tried to buy their way out of it...
...Governor Hicks responded by calling a special session at Frederick, where there were neither federal troops nor secessionist mobs...
...The legislature resolved that only a special convention had the power to declare secession, and then voted 53 to 13 against calling such a convention...
...Two big changes occurred in the '60s and '70s...
...Jeff Stangland Sioux Falls, South Dakota Primary Words James Bowman does a good job of showing how "movie-making without any standards" has led to a degradation of Hollywood products ("Breaking the Code," TAS, June/July 2003...
...Copyright 2003...
...Now they are drowning in debt—who cares...
...It is possible he cribbed a famous quote—if so, I've never seen or heard it anywhere else—but he said: "Freedom of the press doesn't matter if you don't have a peso for a newspaper...
...2003...
...They set up their own failure and should not receive one dime in bailouts...
...Fortunately, I read on and quickly realized that you were simply illustrating where your students were getting the support for their arguments...
...His response, verbatim, is etched in my memory (despite the wine...
...The church does not stand against the market—the church stands against self-absorbed greed in a man's stewardship over his own wealth...
...Teddy Kennedy ("It's the Bishops' Problem," TAS, June/July 2003) and concludes that they must think the following: If these bishops really believed what they were saying about immortal souls being in jeopardy, they wouldn't be afraid to exercise the canonical powers at their disposal (for example, excommunication...
...The church does not define self-interest as sinful...
...One might ask, if bishops really believed in such a modernistic proposition, why wouldn't they just come right out and say so...
...Outside the U.S., add $20 for surface shipping and handling...
...Cloud hanging around bars...
...and (e) after his gig took the reverse trip back to Appleton to catch a plane for Cincinnati...
...Lincoln's career in politics for the six years preceding his election as president was entirely based on opposition to slavery...
...A true conservative opposes socialism for two reasons: It represents an assault on the concept of private property, which is a bedrock value in the Judeo-Christian heritage...
...newsstand distribution by Comag Marketing Group, 250 W. 55th Street, New York, NY 10019-5288...
...The mobs seized control of the city and demanded that the legislature declare secession...
...The silliness of U.S...
...and secondly, the murderous devastation that invariably follows in the wake of utopian socialistic experiments...
...An orthodox Catholic by definition is a conservative in any meaningful (i.e...
...For me, I'd think long and hard before betting my immortal soul on a New Age concept such as "we're all saved...
...Airports, air traffic control, and the national airspace system are all under government control...
...And as for today's bishops, given how so many of them have led the laity astray with the scandal of their behavior—and inaction—universal salvation may be their best hope...
...Presumably Brown meant "could not have cared less," but his grammar is weak...
...Who does he think are our main customers...
...Jeff Smith via e-mail Theo-Coos Brian Simboli has lost his way either in the semantics of the word "conservative" or in his understanding of the magesterium of the Catholic Church—maybe both...
...Conservativism' and Catholicism," TAS, June/July 2003...
...I had arranged to stay overnight at the small on-site hotel to better absorb the ruins in the early morning hours...
...I also look forward to the privatization of terminals and the elimination of antitrust laws, so the common and more privileged folk alike can enjoy even greater convenience at lower cost...
...He is not against positive development, but he abhors change for its own sake...
...I thought Ben Stein was a Reagan-style conservative and economist...
...I was joined at dinner by a Chilean gentleman...
...Rich Rostrom Chicago, Illinois...
...On April 19, 1861—five days after the bombardment of Fort Sumter—secessionist mobs attacked Union troops passing through Baltimore en route to Washington...
...Cloud, Minnesota, from the Minneapolis airport (a seventy-mile trip...
...In other words, a conservative struggles to conserve the wisdom and goodness of those who have gone before him...
...Cloud (a seven-hour trip during which he would have passed through the Twin Cities again...
...In the June/July issue he told of trying to get to St...
...Ben should be praising the creation of this "subway" airline rather than the antiquated business models of the "major" carriers...
...There is also evidence that children benefit from the greater resources that older parents typically have...
...Another response was to have more sex outside of marriage, as waiting is tedious and the risk of pregnancy could be removed...
...What are the effects on marriages and on children...
...But there's more...
...All rights reserved...
...Greg Dunbar via e-mail Calling All Travel Agents I worship and adore Ben Stein, but I wonder about his sanity sometimes when I read about his itineraries...
...Glasses of wine quickly turned the small talk to light politics, and I asked the gentleman what he thought about Pinochet...
...Ramsey Haddad via e-mail Something in the Way She Mores Re...
...I was reminded of a casual conversation I had while visiting Machu Picchu in the mid-'80s—a conversation that turned out to be an epiphanic event in my drift rightward from the thoroughly leftist canons of campus politics in the late '60s and early '70s...
...Southwest gives ordinary folks the "freedom to fly"—and, besides, we are not thesubway airline but the Greyhound airline—and damned proud of it...
...The market functions as a result of the interactions of self-interested individuals...
...They may make more mature choices or simply find a better match from having searched longer...
...In his June/July "Diary," he rightly derides the clueless college girls expecting government handouts, yet he also wants Washington to bail out the airlines and telecom companies...
...Perhaps this is Ben's point—that ordinary people are great as long as they stay in their place...
...Wonderful...
...Back issues: $7.50 (includes shipping and handling...
...Presumably he's referring to his father Herbert, who—though I admire him greatly—was a major figure behind Nixon's price and wage controls...
...Exacto...
...Letters to the editor are not, of course, the editorial voice...
...There is plenty of evidence that individuals who marry at older ages are less likely to divorce...
...Unfortunately the two punks in the photo are clearly British, not American...
...Mark Belford Captain Southwest Airlines Ben Stein delivers a tirade against airline and phone deregulation in favor of government bailouts in spite of having, as he puts it, "learned the virtues of deregulation at my parents' knee...
...Perhaps they should illustrate the immorality of both nations now that the Coalition of the Willing Two has captured the oil wealth of Iraq, while Saddam and the weapons of mass destruction are nowhere to be found...
...One was the contraceptive pill and the other was that smart women gained access to the professions...
...The American Spectatator is published by The American Spectator, LLC...
...Indeed, if we all go to heaven, who needs religion...
...So is his grasp of history...
...Some virtue...
...To my utter astonishment and dismay, he expressed a reserved gratitude to the man...
...I found myself wishing, audibly, that the old language codes were still in force, protecting us from the naked display of the mental poverty of contemporary screenplay writers...
...This phenomenon is familiar to anyone who watches modern films, including those not about people like James Carville...
...God bless him...
...Taken aback, I blurted out something like what about basic rights, freedom of the press, and all that...
...Indeed, the would-be founders of the Confederacy justified secession on the basis of Lincoln's opposition to slavery (albeit often embellished with claims that Lincoln's "tyranny" consigned wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans...
...Stein's characterization of my carrier as the "subway" airline ("Ben Stein's Diary," TAS, June/July 2003...
...Even if it's on a subconscious level, the message that delivers is that deep inside the bishops believe in some sort of universal salvation—everyone's saved, no matter what...
...Peter Skurkiss Chester Township, New Jersey Peso For Your Thoughts I read with some pleasure John Train's article on Chile and the fall of Allende and Pinochet ("No Apologies," TAS, Mar./Apr...
...Louis, Missouri Bish-Bashing Tom Bethell looks into the minds of pro-abortion Catholics like Sen...
...Patrick Mason via e-mail Ilener late Jennifer Grossman's "Anarchy in Eros" (TAS, June/July 2003) is silly...
...Both effects look like big wins from a conservative worldview...
...But they are indeed afraid, and what that tells us is that they say these things but don't really believe them...
...The letters from J. M. Brown and Don Beach in the June/July 2003 issue are cases in point...
...Kris Tilford Topeka, KansasPaleo Neo-Cons It distresses me to see your excellent magazine contaminated by the malignant factoids of neo-Confederate revisionists...
...We can all just party on...
...Beach is technically correct in saying that West Virginia was not a "Border State," but Virginia itself certainly was, and the part of Virginia that bordered on free states was the part that became West Virginia...
...The church defines greed (disordered self-interest) as sinful...
...There is a striking photo of a punk couple with red, white, and blue spiked Mohawk hair, I assume illustrative of the pierced, studded and tattooed "Starbucks Guy" that D'Sousa says conservatives should embrace...
...Recently I had the unpleasant experience—rather like exploratory surgery—of watching a videotape of Primary Colors (1998), in which the language of the Clinton circle seemed to run the whole gamut of political eloquence from "fuck" to "fucking," which two words made up about a quarterof the film's word stock...
...The modern American Catholic Church gives an even broader message by what it doesn't say...
...Frankly, I rather enjoy watching the discomfort of rich people like Ben Stein, with his broken heart dripping pity for bankrupt companies, as I pay my low fares to visit my children and grandchildren...
...But he restricts his survey to what may or may not be shown on screen and neglects the perhaps more important subject of what may or may not be said...
...Any genuine conservative is not and essentially cannot be at odds with the church's moral teaching on economic matters...
...Sounds like Brigitte Bardot has gone the way of Oriana Fallaci...
...Ben tells us that he (a) spent four hours at the airport...
...Contact: The American Spectator, RU...
...Yes, these selfsame great American working-class icons...
...Simboli seems to have adopted a view of the Left that anyone who is not a socialist must be a "conservative...
...If not for Southwest and the deregulation of 1978 (sorry, Ben, our airline actually predates deregulation by seven years), these folks would forever be limited in their ability to travel...
...Given this, you might want to go back and rethink the issues involved...
Vol. 36 • August 2003 • No. 4
