The American Spectator

p> Christopher Orlet replies: br> I did write, “offend the followers of Allah and you risk a beheading or years hiding out like a most wanted desperado,” and sure enough I received a death threat via email the very same day. Was it a follower of Allah who sent the death threat? Hard to say, since the coward sent it anonymously, but if I were a betting man… /p>

I am certain that freedom of speech and Islam can co-exist, but freedom of speech and fundamentalist Islam cannot. It is the fundamentalists and those who take them seriously who are my concern.

p> THE BEAUTY OF EXPERIENCE br> Re: Jeffrey Lord’s Reagan’s 1986 Election : /p>

Mr. Reagan had discovered the only good thing about growing older: that eventually one realizes that not only has one seen it all before, but that even the biggest rock thrown into the pond causes ripples only for a little while before it sinks out of sight and leaves the pond serene. That is, nothing much that we are hearing blabberjabbered on the air and in the papers 24/7 right now will make a bit of difference in the long run. A person who has paid attention all her life will soon realize that she has seen it all before, and that it was irrelevant the last time and still is. For only one example, the Forbes magazine prediction for the 1980s of an oil shortage and $100 per barrel oil looked silly by 1982; today I can’t get excited about the screaming on the same subject because I’ve seen how that trick works. Today oat brand will save us; tomorrow oat bran will kill us. Today stem cell therapy will make the dead walk; tomorrow it will breed monsters. Today electric cars will cause the temperature to fall; tomorrow somebody will realize that we’re living in a province where, when the temperature rises, the government starts screaming for us to unplug all our appliances and sweat in the dark, and we realize that on the Thursday before a holiday weekend these same people will be screaming for us to unplug our cars. Whatever today’s screaming babies are pointing at will be gone by tomorrow as if it had never been, and so will the next crisis. We can also see the irony in one page of the newspapers shrieking that our teenagers are fat, fat, FAT, and the facing page screaming that they are anorexic because they are obsessed with Body Image.

Mr. Reagan knew what Mr. Bush knows: that whatever today’s bleating about, tomorrow it will be gone. Hold the course and keep smiling. And keep your earplugs in. Whatever the babies are screaming, you’ve already heard it. With age and experience comes the knowledge that there is in truth nothing new under the sun.

p>One of Daddy’s favorite sayings, especially when the kids are moaning about the increased amount of knowledge in today’s world, is “There isn’t more knowledge than there ever was. All that stuff is just more information.” br> —