The American Spectator

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Correspondence

(Page 2 of 2)

Cautionary Tale

James Bowman’s aversion to “trash culture” (TAS, September 2008) brought to mind something that Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), a French writer and naturalized British subject, wrote not long before his death: “We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him. In the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversions of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile.”
VIC STECYK
Richmond Hill, Ontario

An Amateur’s Hour

I enjoyed Alan B. Somers’s review of the 1960 Olympics book (TAS, October 2008). I was in Austria that summer and my only memory was of Rafer Johnson’s great decathlon. In part this was because my Austrian summer family and friends only cared about skiing and winter sports. I went back to see my Austrian friends the winter of 1964 and the first Innsbruck Olympics. I remember West and East Germany participated as one team, at least in hockey, whatever its political significance. In that pre-PETA time the Russians were swathed in luxurious sealskins. You could get close to the athletes and I helped unload bobsleds and was offered rides in several nations’ VW buses. I also remember the police had shiny silver badges with the names of the languages they spoke and one officious guy had a chestful, an harbinger for anyone who realized the powder keg of the Balkans had not ended with the 1919 Paris treaty, in spite of the coming 1976 Sarajevo festivities. I certainly didn’t. If you are still with me, there was one truly amateur feat and that was Terry McDermott’s 500 meter speed skating gold medal. He had competed at Squaw Valley, but was now a barber and recently married in Michigan. Officials begged him to join the team and he came over to Milwaukee on weekends to practice on the only Olympic-scale oval. He made the team, was in the last pairing to skate (a real disadvantage), and set a new Olympic record. I had my father’s 16mm camera and was close enough and at an angle to film his performance as he swept by the finish line and the excitement of the crowd looking back to the electric timing board and exploding into pre-fist-pumping cheers, especially one American in a bright red woolen cap. It was Olympian. It was innocent, amateur triumph in those Cold War times. I like swimming (I went to Bob Kiphuth’s Yale), but I do feel McDermott beats the ballyhooed multi-medaled performances of Mark Spitz and Michael Phelps.
BERT CULVER
St. Louis, Missouri

Ben Stein’s Traitors

Mr. Stein makes excellent points, per usual, in his Diary (“Heroes and Traitors,” TAS, November 2008). Looting is exactly what has taken place. I am in shock that the citizens of the United States of America haven’t taken up cudgels and axe handles and marched on Washington to imprint on the tiny, self-absorbed minds of the criminals in Congress responsible for this looting the true meaning of We, the People.
GARY STEVENSEN
Shakopee, Minnesota