CORRESPONDENCE
Politics and Sports The participants in your symposium on politics and sports (Jan. 27) forgot one of the biggest sports stories over the last 10 years: the phenomenal growth of NASCAR racing and...
...First, the Super Bowl has become a very left-wing event...
...There is only one winner out of nearly 40 drivers in each race...
...And the cyberpunks are not the only ones who are fans of Dick's works...
...Dick was not an ignored writer whose works were suddenly discovered after his death...
...Bottum and Wilson make a good case for an underappreciated aspect of Dick's writings—his insight into the fallen nature of the world...
...Was Dick then a crazed prophet, a paranoid with a brilliant perception about the conspiratorial nature of the world, an acute interpreter of American culture, or someone with a deep, intuitive understanding of the broken, inadequate nature of the human soul...
...Then in September of that year, Bill Clinton started the annual Southern 500 at Darlington...
...One group, a majority, is composed of those with few if any religious beliefs: agnostics, atheists, and other non-Christians...
...What exactly are those outlandish claims...
...They see themselves determining their own destiny in freedom because they are their own god or higher authority...
...In fact, during most of his career, the science-fiction community considered him a solid, if not spectacular, writer, and in 1963 he won the Hugo award for his novel The Man in the High Castle...
...In addition, their uniforms are red and white (very Russian), and they are usually satisfied with winning the most games in the regular season (a feel-good accomplishment) versus winning the Cup...
...Henry J. Schumann, Jr...
...So much for the self-esteem-mongers...
...First, winning is everything...
...And let's not forget 1992...
...Greenbelt, MD J. Bottum and John Wilson respond: Readers who wish to assess for themselves Dick's mental condition should read Lawrence Sutin's biography Divine Invasions followed by Dick's Valis and—if they are still unconvinced—selections from Dick's million-word Exegesis...
...Morton Lurie Raleigh, NC Going Nowhere with PAS Your editorial on physician-assisted suicide was on target ("Constitutional Suicide," Jan...
...But if Barnes still thinks that footy is just for libs, he should meet the guys on my club team, most of whom are ardent right-wingers...
...This overestimates the current popularity of cyberpunk fiction and accepts Wired's own inflated view of its influence...
...27), David Brock says that excessive right-wing scandal-mongering, such as "outlandish claims" about Vince Foster's death and inaccurate books like Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access, have muddied the waters and allowed President Clinton to slip the noose on other, more credible charges...
...When he died in 1982, the movie Blade Runner, based on his novel, was just about to open...
...But there are other reasons why NASCAR is conservative...
...In addition, there is the example of what has actually happened in Holland: The slippery slope has resulted in the death of the comatose without their consent...
...Oviedo, FL No More Scandal Guilt In "My Scandalmongering Problem— and Ours" (Jan...
...27) certainly got it right when he wrote, "Cronkite's credibility is a sometime thing...
...But fundamentally, the debate is about a value system: the meaning of death and suffering, the existence of a loving God, and the mystery of man's final destiny...
...Reynolds—a tobacco company...
...They and a few others have raised serious questions about the circumstances of Foster's death, which four federal investigations have thus far failed to answer in any convincing way...
...If Barnes would like, I'd be glad to treat him to a good game at RFK...
...Chris Ruddy and Reed Irvine, whom Brock blames for circulating unfounded allegations about Foster's death, have never dabbled in conspiracy theories...
...Furthermore, "profoundly psychotic" has a simple medical definition, and Dick didn't remotely satisfy it...
...On this topic there are two diverse groups of people who simply argue past each other because they are speaking different values...
...This would be true if most of the players hailed from areas near Detroit...
...For example, mention Bobby Thompson's "shot heard round the world" to anyone outside the United States, and you will be met with blank stares...
...First, it has violent wrecks and the drivers are all men...
...He was unenthusiastically received with loud boos...
...I concede that these arguments are powerful enough for even a nonbeliever or an atheist to oppose physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia...
...Bottum and Wilson claim, for instance, that Dick was "periodically hospitalized for mental problems and profoundly psychotic for the last eight years before his death...
...Joseph J. Eule Arlington, VA While the premises that Fred Barnes uses to determine a right-wing from a left-wing sport or team are accurate, several of his conclusions are erroneous...
...NASCAR satisfies all four of Fred Barnes's criteria for conservative sports...
...Peter J. Riga Houston, TX Sci-Fi Insanity J. Bottum and John Wilson's article "The Profound Hack" (Jan...
...The cars are unbelievably wasteful in their high-octane gas, and their unmuffled exhaust systems spew fumes directly into the atmosphere...
...But the most important reason NASCAR is conservative is its sponsorship by R.J...
...He was enthusiastically received with wild cheers...
...By the mid-'70s, though, Dick had started to acquire a cult following that transcended the science-fiction field...
...In July of that year, George Bush started the Firecracker 400...
...They simply do not see any value in suffering and view a human being much as any other animal: When it suffers, we put it out of its misery...
...13) is a passable introduction to Philip K. Dick's life and work, but it includes numerous minor errors...
...In 1975, for instance, an interview with Dick appeared in Rolling Stone...
...I'll spare you my feelings about American football, where you could watch an entire season and not see as much athleticism as in one professional football match...
...Football transcends Barnes's neighborhood...
...Fourth, it is dominated by commercialism and lucrative team sponsorships...
...We almost threw him off the team (being a lib, he wasn't that good anyway...
...His most notable recent work is an annual New Year's Day appearance extolling the glories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the Vienna Philharmonic PBS broadcast...
...This is a specific kind of theological view of suffering and of the end of life, as opposed to the philosophical holding of the majority...
...Cronkite didn't understand what happened during the Viet-Cong's Tet offensive and then misled the whole country with his "editorial comments" about the war...
...They answer to none but themselves...
...But as anyone who has read the Aldrich book knows, its central theme is that under this administration, the White House security apparatus has been deliberately and completely undermined...
...Both stays were only for a few weeks and were as short as could be expected in such circumstances...
...Part of Barnes's problem is that he thinks only in terms of his own world...
...Such a game would help Barnes understand the greatest, most conservative sport on earth...
...Second, the fans are fiercely conservative...
...Now that the other team is getting a new stadium, RFK's beautiful field won't be desecrated by all those stupid lines...
...The Vienna orchestra is also infamous in that it is the last world-class orchestra that doesn't employ women...
...Dick's reception by the science-fiction community is a long and interesting story but does not bear upon the point we were making...
...Indeed, I remember the time when a new player made the mistake of wearing to practice a T-shirt with some left-wing sentiment about Central America...
...Wendell Wagner, Jr...
...In any case, Dick was only one of the precursors of cyberpunk...
...Bill Greene Lusby, MD This is the second time Fred Barnes has called football (being a real conservative, I won't use the word "soccer") a "liberal" sport, and I've had it ("My Sports Right or Left," Jan...
...Second, NASCAR is totally unsafe for the environment...
...Cronkite should be careful about that...
...As for teams, Barnes, in a previous article, labeled the Detroit Red Wings a right-wing team because it hails from a tough city...
...In fact, Dick was hospitalized only twice for mental problems, once in 1972 and again in 1976...
...But a disproportionate share of players are of European (especially Russian) descent...
...Clearly there are secular dangers to physician-assisted suicide, as the editors pointed out, the major one being that doctors will become angels of death rather than angels of mercy...
...Carl P. Limbacher Oyster Bay, NY Clueless Cronkite Reviewing Walter Cronkite's memoirs, Philip Terzian ("Anchor Steam," Jan...
...But if he believes that some of these accounts are truly unfounded, Brock would do better to refute them on their merits—and leave the conspiracy theories about right-wing Clinton-haters to the White House...
...The other group, a minority, views man as created in the image of God and sees as value in suffering (not all Christians hold this view, but most of those who do not have left the traditional beliefs of Christianity...
...Cyberpunk was a style of science fiction that reached its high-water mark in the mid-'80s...
...Third, it is southern and has a tradition traceable to the '20s and Prohibition...
...But mention Gordon Banks's save off a Pele header in the 1970 World Cup or Maradona's "hands of God" goal against England, and you will have a conversation...
...More bothersome is the artificial opposition Bottum and Wilson set up between their understanding of Dick and that of the people they call his "self-proclaimed children," the cyberpunks and readers of Wired magazine...
...Bottum and Wilson also speak as if Dick were entirely neglected during his lifetime and achieved the recognition he deserved only after his death...
...A more accurate statement is that his critical and popular esteem had been slowly but steadily growing for 30 years...
...The Super Bowl puts a great deal of emphasis on the half-time entertainment (usually a liberal entertainer), the outcome is known prior to kickoff (the NFC representative will win), yet the AFC is invited so that both conferences are represented, and advertisers must appeal to both genders since a lot of women watch the Super Bowl even though they did not watch one regular-season game all year...
...27) forgot one of the biggest sports stories over the last 10 years: the phenomenal growth of NASCAR racing and the loyalty of the drivers and their fans to the conservative cause...
...As for his feud with Gary Aldrich, Brock would have us believe that the focus of Unlimited Access was the questionable report that Clinton slipped away to the Washington Marriott for unseemly assignations...
...It is unfortunate that Brock has now thrown in with his former media attackers, piling on other whistleblow-ers who report inconvenient stories...
Vol. 2 • February 1997 • No. 21
