For a while during the Bush years I compulsively visited conservative websites like townhall.com to argue with the crazies there. Somehow, given the political landscape of the country in those days, I felt that sitting around in a left-leaning forum like salon and congratulating my fellow lefties on how right they were and how bad the Bushies were was a form of sticking my head in the sand. It seemed then that engaging the crazies head-on was the only way for me to participate in the national debate—after all, these were the guys who controlled the media and seemed to have the American public marching in lock-step with them.

Times have changed. Anyone who reads Glenn Greenwald knows that the hardcore Right's hold on the public is diminishing as we speak. And while reading the banter on this forum is entertaining, I no longer feel the itch to respond to the crazies. Before I was lashing out against them from a position of weakness, but now they are the weak ones, and their childish, jingoist distortions of reality no longer hold sway. Sure, they aren't beaten yet, but every time they open their mouths with another mind-numbingly inaccurate portrayal of the world—of their enemies, foreign and domestic, the nature of a piece of legislation, the situation in Iraq—they dig themselves deeper in their hole and make it ever clearer that they live in an alternate universe. All of their distortions have been shown false over and over again, and nothing we say will convince them of anything. Why bother? For the fun of it, I suppose, but isn't it more fun, now that we have the luxury of doing so, to dismiss them like the ants they are? There are real arguments to be had and real battles to be waged in this country now. Why bother arguing with a bunch of dead-enders? Why, as Harry Reid pointed out, get into a name-calling match with someone with a 9-percent approval rating?

Rick

I didn't have time to read all the letters, and probably no one will have the chance to read mine, but I want to echo the previous comments by saying that this article (or blog entry?) was a worthless piece of crap, and also add a few of my own cents.

To begin with, I'd like to paraphrase Dmitri Shostakovich, talking about his breakfast: "Consider these eggs I am eating that our cook made for us. Now imagine someone who does not make them or eat them, but talks about them. This is the musicologist." It may be that this is also the music critic.

We have to consider what we mean when we debate a work of art's "greatness." There have been a great many people here who defended Sgt Pepper with historical arguments—if you understood the sixties, you would know why we love it so much, it's been very influential, etc. Granted, if these "critics" can't hear the influence Pepper has had on every album that has come since, they don't have ears to speak of, but what they are arguing is not that the album was unimportant at the time, but that is not immortal—that it has not stood the test of time, and, unlike an immortal work, which should become more powerful over time, it speaks to us with a lesser voice than it did in the sixties.

I am 25 years old, and so I cannot attest to the power this music had in the sixties, but I can say that I have a deep emotional connection to it and have ever since I "discovered" it ten years ago. It is a part of me and part of the constant soundtrack that runs through my head. Every one of its songs looks for new ways of breaking down the old order, through the stories it tells or the sounds it combines. The play on amateur bands ("what would you do if I sang out of tune?"), the presence of an audience in a studio album (think of the laughter and cheers in the title song) the young breaking free of the old—this is literal in "she's leaving home" but is a constant motif, in fixing a hole, a day in the life, within you without, good morning— it's all about about not wanting to live the life your parents have, trying to break out and find new ways of being in the world. And then, ta-da, they throw in a whole lot of great tunes.

I identified with all these things as a teenager, hearing it as a personal and generational call to arms, and as I grow a little older and my concerns change, I can still adapt it and make it part of the story I tell about myself. Sgt. Pepper is not my favorite Beatles album, but it is one of their (in my estimation) seven immortal albums (the single with Strawberry Field/Penny Lane could almost count as an eighth, but alas, one has to exclude it on technical grounds). It may not be the pop culture phenomenon it was in the sixties, but it will always be listened to, like Mozart and Beethoven, long after I am gone, and long after the world has forgotten the Shins or the White Stripes, or, yes, the Rolling Stones.