To the editor: Regarding Steve Steward’s opinion of Stevie Ray Vaughan (Last Call, Sept. 21, 2011) Yes, you are entitled to your opinion — and we all know what opinions are like.
Alan Brett Boggs
Fort Worth
To the editor: Good for you for saying what nobody else dared to say in print! Stevie Ray Vaughan was undeniably an adequate guitarist (which you were careful to underscore), but the cult of adulation is way, way out of proportion with anyone’s technical abilities on the instrument.
Texas Blues is a narrowly focused genre, and within that realm he was darned good, but he’s been anointed by friends and fans to a demi-god status, beyond criticism — and you weren’t even being critical, just less than effusive.
Who in the realm of Texas Blues deserves the kind of stature that people have given to SRV? Perhaps nobody. It’s all a matter of personal taste: Lightning Hopkins or Johnny Winter, or … Jimmy Vaughan? I daresay that the extreme adoration surrounding the legacy of SRV is fundamentally antithetical to the nature of the blues heritage, and should therefore be flatly rejected by die-hard fans, no matter how much you love the music and the musician.
Thanks for saying what a small minority of people think and feel but don’t have the opportunity to express.
William Williams
Fort Worth
Half-Truths?
To the editor: Gotta give Ms. Austry (Letters, Sept. 21, 2011) props for managing to get so many half-truths and outright mischaracterizations into one letter complaining about Gov. Perry. I see Mr. Perry’s campaign, like folks in Arkansas did back in 1990 — “get him out of the state.” But, Sharon, really — deport Hispanics and gays? Perhaps you missed the illegal immigrant part. No idea where you got the “deport gays” — maybe you just decided that’s what he wants. A lot of liberals do that. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, if you bother to look up the definition and apply it to Social Security after Congress has managed to mess it up by using it to “balance the budget” and for other things. Have you any idea how much oil companies spend on searching for more oil fields? Obviously not, but do they deserve subsidies? Ask Congress — they keep giving them. And by the way — everyone does have a right to carry a gun, under the 2nd Amendment, except criminals. So, why not students? They have no protection on campus. That’s why we have the 2nd Amendment, to protect the people from government and idiots.
Then of course, there’s “global warming.” The science is false and the computer model is fake. Yes, we should all be conscious of the environment. But, we’ve built no new refineries since the ’60s. Each time we have a crisis, we are told that a new refinery won’t help now — it’ll take 10 years to build it. The Environmental Protection Agency is more concerned about some tree frog or snail darter than the country actually becoming self-sufficient for oil. It is time to close the EPA down. They have so much damage that it will take centuries for the country to get over it.
Enjoy your Kool-Aid.
Corbin Douthitt
Hurst
Self-Inflicted Blindness
In Tom Hayden’s story (“9/11 Blind,” Sept. 7, 2011), the child who went temporarily blind didn’t have the maturity to deal with the trauma; I guess Mr. Hayden suffers from a similar malady.
It’s called war — an attack by guerrillas who apparently don’t like Mr. Hayden’s country. The reaction was not “a spasm of blind rage” but a thoughtful and measured response against identifiable supporters of those guerrillas. Mr. Hayden’s fantasy interpretation of the motives for this country’s response seems more like an Obama-lackey’s attempt to blame the mortgaging of our future on anybody else. And with regard to “Who knows what future might have followed … Al Gore” — may God have mercy on us.
Alas, I’ll have to reserve the rest of my rebuttal to a later time. I can’t seem to get past the opening paragraphs!
Mark Hancock
Fort Worth
