The American Spectator

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Current Wisdom

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Of course, because apple trees take years before they begin to bear fruit, it will be necessary for the Obamas to be in residence for more than one term so that they will be able to reap what they have so wisely sown.
Eric Chivian

Boston, March 21, 2009
The writer is director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School

From the Archives

Timeless Tosh from current Wisdoms Past (May 1989)

Los Angeles Times Magazine

The battle between the sexes gets rough, as the godlike Susan Littwin reports from the aerobics field of honor:

I’m middle-aged and middle-class and I have no history of violence. In fact, the only thing I do with any physical force at all is exercise, and I do that in a fancy health club in the Valley. So I surprised myself a few weeks ago when I nearly came to blows with a half-naked man in my aerobics class. The man had planted himself front and center in a fast-paced class and refused to budge when the class began moving back and forth across the room. He just stood there, doing his own little duck paddle. When I crossed what he considered to be his territory, he pushed me—hard. This was no warning nudge. This was an outright mean shove.

I turned on him like a kid in a schoolyard fight. The music stopped; luckily, no fists flew. We stood toe to toe, eyes blazing. “Don’t you ever push me again!” I said, teeth clenched. “You’d better watch out!” he lashed back, jaw jutting.

Never mind that I felt foolish. What matters to me now is why I was so angry with this otherwise unprepossessing middle-aged man. At the time, I just felt that he was an intruder, an intolerably male and self-important intruder.

The truth is—and I’m fully aware that I’ll be called a reverse sexist, but I’ve lived with direct sexism a long time, and now it’s my turn—I’m highly annoyed by men in aerobics classes.

(February 5, 1989)

San Francisco Chronicle

The auspicious consequences of an all-bran supper on Art:

In Milwaukee, Kevin (G.G.) Allin, 32, a member of the group Toilet Rockers, has been charged with disorderly conduct after a performance in which he allegedly cut himself with glass, exposed himself to the audience, and defecated on stage.

“I’ve done it before, but I don’t do it at every show,” he said. “I don’t want to be predictable.”
(March 3, 1989)