The Aging Process - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
The Aging Process
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SIXTY-YEAR MAN
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s Happy Birthday, Mr. Ex-President:

The bubble is firmly encased around him. He's the rock star president (another '60s originated phenom) and will always attract young mindless celebrity agog groupies. Ms. Mayo is of the older groupie persuasion and has no bubble to protect her from the same real world. She bet on the wrong horse of political philosophy to invest her life in. You're right about their coming reaction to even more unpleasant awakenings. We need to set the national civility system on SEVERE as the elections near and all these unhinged people can argue with is their excretory system.
Laurey Boyd

I too am among the group turning 60 along with the President and the Ex-President. Somewhere in the back of my head there is a voice screaming “You can't be that old”! Alas, I am, but our generation is determined to stay young. We work longer, we take care of ourselves and we do not consider ourselves to be old. The Ex-President might as well enjoy it. It's coming!
Jean Sherrill
Huntingdon, Tennessee

I would love to meet Bob Tyrrell; I know he's very busy. But someday, just a chance to say thank you for educating me in true conservatism He and Rush are my political heroes.

Count me as part of the 70% who are 60 and don't mind at all. I am busy, I write, I love being with my grandchildren — it doesn't get much better than this. Sixty was a tough number till I took stock of my life and realized how good it is.

So, just in case, I never meet R. Emmett Tyrrell, I'll say thank you right now. You are a great thinker and writer. Thanks for many hours of education.
Judy Beumler
Louisville, Kentucky

I guess it is better to obsess over the former president's birthday than the confront the disaster that has been created by the current president. Pathetic!
Michael Roush

EMERGENCY CALL
Re: Jeremy Lott's Pain in the Neck:

You need a physician, not a chiropractor or masseuse. Torticollis is a neurological problem. Get yourself examined by a neurologist, pronto!
Louise
Frederick, Maryland

Some good does actually come from age. My experience in life tells me that the reason so very many medical professionals make snide remarks and generally denigrate chiropractors and massage therapists is that there are times when ONLY chiropractic/massage techniques work. Been there, done that.

I will make an exception in the above opinion for acupuncture. I have never had acupuncture, so I can't judge its efficacy one way or the other.
Ken Shreve

POPULARITY GEOPOLITICS
Re: Christopher Orlet's Why They Don't Hate Us:

Whence this need to be liked? I don't even care if my neighbors like me, as long as they shower regularly.
David Govett
Davis, California

When I came home from Vietnam the traitors Fonda and Kerry, and the protesting Clintons and their ilk, were frenzied in their efforts to encourage the North Vietnamese to kill more Americans so there could be peace. Their words stung like lashes. The hatred, the vitriol they spewed made it seem to me that perhaps there may truly be something fundamentally wrong with the United States. My father, God Bless him, quickly dispelled that notion with the following words: “Go to any border of this country with any other country. When you get there look at the way the feet are pointing. On the other side of our border they are all pointing in. Feet don't lie, people do.”

Try the same thing to day. Nothing has changed.
Jay W. Molyneaux

Well done, Mr. Orlet. Only one quibble — the Michael Moores and Julia Sweigs and Dahlia Lithwicks and Maureen Dowds and Chris Matthews and…are, in effect, useful idiots as well as useless idiots and ingrates at a minimum. The other question is why do they hate us?
P.A. Melita
Charlottesville, Virginia

Hats off to Christopher Orlet for a marvelous response to the hate America Democrats, liberals, leftists and fifth columnists. Having lived in Western Europe I have only contempt for the racists and anti-Semites who abound there (primarily in the ranks of the effete left). It is amazing that on a supposedly civilized continent tens of thousands of people often die during the summer, because they don't have air conditioners. No wonder Europeans are green with envy — even our poor live better than much of Western Europe's working and middle class.

As for those Arabs and Muslims who hate the U.S. — they hate everybody so who cares what they think. Even if we throw Israel “overboard” they'll still hate us. We're infidels and unwilling to submit to their hate filled theological chauvinism. The best thing we could do is explode Electro Magnetic Pulse weapons over Iran, Syria and other unsavory Muslim states that encourage anti-American terrorism and instantly return them to a time and lifestyle reminiscent of the prophet or the Caliphates. Poof! The threat of a nuclear Iran is gone.

Quite frankly, who cares what foreigners think of the U.S.? We've got enough to worry about at home with the threat of Democrat disciples of European appeasement, anti-Semitism, anti-Christianity and neo-Jacobinism taking power and flushing us down the same crapper Europe is in.
Michael Tomlinson
Crownsville, Maryland

Christopher Orlet writes that of the nations that like America, “Three of the four, however, are liberal democracies: Japan (63 percent favorable), Nigeria (62) Great Britain (56), and India (56). Not surprisingly all five predominately Muslim countries surveyed held highly negative views.”

When last I was there, The Hausa forces of the Sultan of Sokoto and other Islamic Northerners were celebrating Nigerian exceptionalism by riding south to dip their Korans in the sea, and shoot, shell and strafe my hosts in the Christian minority enclave of Biafra . Since then the 65,000,000 Muslims in the majority have settled down into what I had mistaken for a sporadically murderous kleptocracy, but now that Mr. Orlet assures me I am mistaken, I will pay closer attention to the e-mails of the many Nigerians anxious to show their pro-American bona fides by offering me unclaimed megabucks as soon as I dispatch bank account numbers and complete proof of identity. I'm sure Orlet will hasten to forward his.
Russell Seitz

The Editor replies: Mr. Seitz misread the excerpt he cites: it notes that “three of the four” countries mentioned are liberal democracies. Of those four, who else but Nigeria could have been the odd man out?

MUSIC MAN
Re: Roger Scruton's The Music of America:

I find it incredible that Mr. Scruton wrote an entire article on American music and did not mention Elvis Presley.

Frank Sinatra? Barbra Streisand? Peggy Lee? Please. If the “Great American Songbook” doesn't include “Heartbreak Hotel,” it isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

Elvis changed the world, but few recognize what he did or how he did it. He mixed rhythm and blues with gospel and soul, tightened it up and gave it a beat. “Heartbreak Hotel” was originally a slow, mournful jazz piano tune keyed for a woman. Elvis turned it into rock and roll. And he was the first and only one who had the balls to get up on stage and perform it live. That singular act did more to influence the world we live in than any other.

Between 1956 and 1986, Elvis sold over one billion records. One billion! And that doesn't include all the records he sold after 1986, namely the CD re-releases which doubtless number in the hundreds of millions. To this day, almost 30 years after his death, Elvis still sells some 35 million records every year. No other artist can make that claim.

It is estimated that 70 percent of the televisions in the entire world were turned on to Elvis's “Aloha From Hawaii” concert, the first ever world satellite broadcast. That would translate into an audience of somewhere around two billion at the time. No one will ever be that big ever again.

Graceland is the second most visited tourist site in the United States, after the White House. Tens of thousands of people journey from all over the world every year just to see the small wood frame house in Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis was born. Think about that.

America had no culturally distinctive music before Elvis, and no culturally distinctive music not influenced by Elvis after 1956. He defined American music.

He never played to an empty seat. Can the same be said of any of the performers mentioned by Scruton? I don't think so.
Scott Collier
Edinburg, Texas

Thank you for a great article. There really is something to be proud of in our musical culture, and you woke me up to it. I forwarded the article to my whole family, and I'm going to buy a guitar =).

Thanks again.
Zach Cochran

VICE SQUADS
Re: Mark Tooley's Sanctuary Chic:

Excellent article about the Methodist Church desperately grasping for relevance in today's fast-paced world. Unfortunately, their ploy looks like some bad Steven Seagal movie (Stop! I know that's redundant!) without even the benefit of some cool martial arts scenes. I was incredulous that anyone would try this…it's so 1980s. But then with the amount of play the freak show known as Cindy Sheehan has gotten, why not? The media scouts are always on the lookout for fresh new acts, plus, isn't it about time for an '80's revival? Didn't I see a Miami Vice movie out? Maybe Don Johnson or Philip Michael Thomas could go visit Ms. Arellano and denounce the drug-funded, CIA-directed Contra war in Nicaragua. The Methodist church needs to realize that while people love a fresh, creative story, sequels often stink. Just look at Weekend at Bernie's II.
Andrew J. Macfadyen, M.D.
Omaha, Nebraska

AMERICAN SCORES
Re: Quin Hillyer's Are American's Becoming Losers?: and Reader Mail's Win Some, Lose Some:

Corvette Racing: GT1 (and previously GTS where applicable)-class winners of the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005 and 2006.

* American race car (2 of them, actually)
* American team
* International representation on the team, to include American driver Johnny O'Connell

That's 24 consecutive hours of very, very, very fast road racing per showing for the team (three drivers per car) which, with straight speeds exceeding 200 mph in the Corvette's class, I think involves a certain amount of pressure for drivers and for the engineers and mechanics who keep the wheels on the wagon. (Aston Martin frequently puts up faster lap times but has less success in race reliability.) Plus it's in France, which means it's won in France, in front of the French. You gotta like that.
Mark Stewart
Jacksonville, Florida

How many times can we, must we, will we continue to write about the way the liberal/mainstream media fails to report or intentionally ignores what liberals do and say, no matter how racist, divisive or deceitful, but ad nauseam places under the scanning electron microscope every jot and title of what conservatives and/or Republicans say and do?

This isn't news. Nor is it an outrage anymore, disgusting though it is. It's just the same-old, same-old from the liberals' lapdogs. And those old dogs and their young pups don't seem to be trainable in other behavior.
C. Kenna Amos Jr.
Princeton, West Virginia

LISA FABRIZIO REPLIES
Re: M. Brahmbhatt's letter (under “Real Virginian”) in Reader Mail's Win Some, Lose Some:

Surely Mr. Brahmbhatt realizes that the definition of the verb “fudge” is:

1 a : to devise as a substitute : FAKE b : FALSIFY Where did I suggest that Mr. Allen “morphed” or “mispronounced” or “riffed” the name? It's my contention that he just made “Macaca” up out of thin air. Silly; yes. Racist; quite a stretch.

And again, he takes Senator Allen's comments completely out of context. He was welcoming Mr. Sidarth into America, and the “real world of Virginia” as opposed to the Beltway or Hollywood.

Where he finds the evidence that Allen thinks “you can't be a real American or a real Virginian if you have a brown skin,” is known only to him. Some people see racism everywhere.

By the way, when my grandparents came here with their “silly foreign names,” they were met with much more verbal abuse and mistrust in this country — including the physical search my grandmother went through every morning on her way to work because, although she had two sons in the service in WWII, she was an Italian–than Mr. Sidarth will encounter in his lifetime.
Lisa Fabrizio

THE NEW DIPLOMACY
Re: Christopher Orlet's War Eternal:

I absolutely agree that if we want to win this war on terrorism we need to get rid of the childish, '60s, buy-the-world-a coke-and-live-in-harmony fantasies. Israel will now have to pay an even bigger price in more lives lost, as this phony cease-fire that will not last is only an excuse to let the terrorists regroup and rearm. This is Clintonite thinking that has been adopted by the Bush administration, and these people, including Condoleezza Rice, need to get their head out of the clouds and realize that no peace treaty or cease-fire will ever be permanent until we deal the terrorists a decisive, crushing blow. And yet these ignorant fools with their Clintonian thinking still believe in the '60s bull crap that we can “negotiate” a peace treaty with these savages without a decisive military victory. If we hadn't used the atom bomb on Japan, we probably would have ended up with nearly a million more casualties if we had to invade that country. There will never be a victory over Hezbollah or any other terrorist organization as long as we keep listening to the ignorant communist fools at the U.N. who feel that the terrorists are equal to the rest of us, and deserve the same rights. This attitude is what is stopping us from living in a truly peaceful world — the communist b.s. idea that Western civilization is no better than that of the savages that have declared war on us. Mr. Kofi and the rest of the U.N. fools are no different than Neville Chamberlain.
Jerry Sorrentino

PEOPLE TO PEOPLE OUTREACH
Re: Nathan Maskiell's letter (under “Reader Mail Corner”) in Reader Mail's The Eyes Have It:

I'd like to thank Nathan Maskiell of Melbourne, Australia, for taking such interest in America to defend us from “those who think the USA is a belligerent, thoughtless, and red-neck blight on the world.” We appreciate it.

I, in turn, keep up with what happens in Australia politics to defend your country from those who think the Aussies are nothing but beer swilling Neanderthals that call fighting rugby and make fun of the silly uniforms they wear playing Australian football.

Last time I checked your Prime Minister Howard was a good friend of the USA and conservative even by your standards. We thank him.
Greg Barnard
Franklin, Tennessee
P.S. I do like hanging out with the Nashville Kangaroo Australian Football club. What a hoot!

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