(” I am impatient with impatience!”)

I fielded some crotchety blowback from a recent blogpost– the one (“If You Don’t Have a Banjo”) where I observed how tedious it is to hear the less-than-perfect riders and horses get belittled for their shortcomings. I was accused of pandering to a lower common denominator audience with pedestrian goals and no gumption to “aim for the stars.”

Digressing, I’m reminded of iconic ’50s comedian Mort Sahl’s remark upon the publication of Dr. Werner von Braun’s autobiography, “I Aim for the Stars.” Von Braun before heading NASA’s space program which eventually put Americans on the moon, captained the Germans’ WW2 ballistic missile program. Saul’s suggestion: von Braun’s book, “I Aim for the Stars” should’ve been subtitled “But Most of the Time I Just Hit London . . . “

So I restate: I am impatient with impatience! I truly admire a beautiful ride of International caliber. I appreciate the dedication, effort, and sacrifice it takes to produce one. In the back of my having-come-of-age-in-the-Sixties, closet-radical mind, I harbor a certain distrust of the New Gilded Age of $14 Wellington hamburgers, acres of goose necks with living quarters, and six or seven figure horses that it takes to be relevant at that level.

When a horse is purchased for an amount that could build a dozen Third World school houses or half a hospital, it leaves me wondering if Osama wasn’t at least partly right.

Only a small piece of my mind thinks that. (Back to Mort Sahl again), who said, “Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they’ve stolen.” That said, I’ve never turned down a fancy meal, and if carried to extreme, adherence to this viewpoint would argue against symphonies, artists, sportsmen, and every other non utilitarian investment. From what I’ve read, that’s been tried and the gray Workers’ Paradise of mid 20th Century East Germany was never mistaken for Fun City!

Okay, enough of that. All I meant to point out is that mere mortals and mere generic equines must be accepted and appreciated at whatever level their skills, circumstances, and good or ill fortune can bring to bear. A student today had one of those Cretin Genius Moments when she brightly spouted back to me a truism I’d been trying to drill into her head literally for years. She stopped mid sentence when she realized where these words had come from, but since they were finally directly connected to something she had felt, I felt completely rewarded. All for lots less than a hundred grand.