YOGA: NOT JUST FOR YUPS
P.J. O'ROURKE'S "The Editor's Chair" (CASUAL, July 31) briefly denounces yoga as something fuzzy-minded liberal yuppies do. I'm a conservative who has practiced yoga since the start of the year, and I believe yoga is fully compatible with compassionate conservatism.
For one, it works: I've gotten stronger since I've started taking yoga classes. I've stretched muscles I haven't stretched in 30 years. Second, it's traditional: The poses in yoga have been perfected over thousands of years. Third, it's cheap: You don't need heavy iron to practice yoga. All the equipment you'd ever need won't cost you more than $50. Fourth, you can meet girls, and chicks dig yoga! Granted, you can easily go overboard, spending huge sums on yoga retreats or yoga bed and breakfasts. You could spend lots of money on outfits, books, CDs, and meditation sessions. But I contend that spending $15 for 90 minutes of yoga each week is a prudent, conservative expenditure.
MARTIN MORSE WOOSTER
Silver Spring, Md.
POST-HUMANE SOCIETY
WESLEY J. SMITH's first-rate "The Catman Cometh" (June 26), introducing some of the fringe elements of post-human utopianism, would have been hilarious if it weren't illustrative of such a scary (but not new) ethic of eugenics, in which the mortal reality of human existence serves as the ultimate enemy, to be destroyed at all costs (at the cost, even, of individual human lives).
Smith didn't mention here how this dehumanizing ethic has also come up again in the context of embryonic stem cell research (and which, once again, has come to the fore of political debate, President Bush having recently vetoed the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act). I hope that this year, the "year of Our Ford 98" according to Brave New World, is not too late to recapture a lost sense of value for every individual human life as such. I am scared to think that the only thing Aldous Huxley may have miscalculated in his novel (set in A.F. 632, that is, A.D. 2540) is its timetable.
CHRIS HAMMER Charlottesville, Va.
A CLASSIC KERFUFFLE
PROFESSORS Jon Steffan Bruss and Christopher McDonough were kind enough to cite my 2004 presidential address to the national classics conference in their review of Lee Pearcy's book ("Eternal Verities," June 26), but I must remonstrate about what I can only conclude is a typographical error. When they say, "It is interesting that, though O'Donnell had come to bury classics, he instead simply asked it to commit suttee," it should surely read, "It is praiseworthy that O'Donnell urged that classicists take a more expansionist and ambitious view of their subject and aspire to make even more significant contributions to human understanding than has been the case in the past." I can well understand that this minor error slipped past your eagle-eyed proofreading.
JAMES J. O'DONNELL
Washington, D.C.
CORRECTION
IN A STILL PHOTOGRAPH from the 1938 production of Jezebel, appearing with Rachel DiCarlo's "Miss Davis's Life" (Aug. 7), the actress Fay Bainter was misidentified as Spring Byington, who was also in the cast.