Michael Savage Risks Reputation

Here's a bit of "news" I see at least once a week in the Kingsport Times-News, and believe is worth sharing: People under 50, and people under 40, and occasionally even people under 20, can and do die from strokes and heart attacks.

Is it "natural"? Well...it probably didn't happen every week when humankind were leading more "natural" lives, hunting and gathering, or even working hard on the farm. Then again, some of the people to whom it happens had congenital heart problems; similar heart problems undoubtedly contributed to the untimely deaths (and long declines) of those who succumbed to infections back then.

For most of us, the important story here is the same whether it's Andrew Breitbart's obituary, or Joe Blow's, or the obituary in the Times-News two years ago of a nine-year-old boy whose complications from what appeared to be flu included a stroke. Sometimes these "premature" cardiovascular deaths are really unexpected, but most of the time they "just happen to" people who are overweight, don't exercise, eat junkfood, hold grudges, and look for "excitement." (A fat, sluggish nine-year-old has not had time to build up the kind of cardiovascular disease that typically kills fat, sluggish fifty-somethings, but that poor little fellow who had the stroke was obviously heading in that direction--he looked as if he weighed over a hundred pounds.)

It occurred to me, after I'd dashed off a flippant dismissal of the "conspiracy theory" about Breitbart's death, that what I meant by "looked and may physically have been 'older'" may have been unclear. I mean that some of the physical changes we attribute to aging are genetic, like the time when hair turns grey, and some are actually caused by wear and tear...but most of them are caused by ill health and are subject to our voluntary control.

For example, some of us inherited something called a "broken thirst response." We tend not to feel thirst, or to confuse thirst with hunger, until we're positively dehydrated. One of the warning signs of mild dehydration is the appearance of reversible wrinkles in our faces. When we skip those boring glasses of water, our faces look saggy and baggy. When we drink water, we look young again. And if our dehydration is associated with heavy use of caffeine, alcohol, and/or tobacco, each of which has harmful effects on cardiovascular health, a physical examination may reveal a condition doctors have been known to describe as "You're only 35, but you have the heart of a 70-year-old."

I don't like the "physical age was older than chronological age" expressions that describe people in this condition. I apologize for using one. Nevertheless, that's what comes to mind when I look at those pictures of Andrew Breitbart and then look at the figure "43." It's no surprise to read, this morning, that he'd sought medical help for heart disease.

So I read this as a cautionary "It could happen to you" news story, and if an e-friend hadn't died prematurely, last week, from cancer, I would probably have segued straight into the topic of cardiovascular health. Women are usually safe until midlife--but some of us are having heart attacks within a year or two after midlife. Males, like that poor nine-year-old boy, apparently aren't safe at any age.

Genes don't provide any "safe base." I had a reprehensible old relative who didn't drink alcohol or smoke, but he chewed tobacco, ate only white-flour biscuits, had red meat at least once a day and fried chicken whenever anyone came to visit (even if we weren't hungry), and laughed at the idea of taking care of his arteries. He was active--probably hyperactive in youth--and stayed trim and bouncy so long it wasn't even decent. Into his eighties he was climbing trees, turning back flips, and running races with his grandchildren, and while this was why my whole generation loved to visit this relative, it had a harmful effect on the generation in between, his sons and daughters. When they heard about cardiovascular health, they all said, "Nobody could be healthier than Dad is. Why should we eat differently than Dad does?"

Unfortunately, most of them lived in town, did desk jobs, did not climb trees or turn back flips, and had that heavy, sluggish, impending-heart-attack look at an early age. One of the seven sons had died, and one of the five daughters had had open-heart surgery, before age 40. Most of the sons and daughters died before their Dad. Every one of the children who lived to attend their Dad's funeral had been pronounced disabled by diabetes and/or heart disease.

Want to eat lots of salt, sugar, white-flour biscuits, and fatty meat? Well...if you live on a farm, raise free-range chickens, and spend as much time outdoors as those chickens do, and if you abstain from all drugs other than home-grown and home-processed tobacco, and if you are naturally slow to anger, never hold a grudge, and leave home only once or twice a month, then maybe genes will give you a free pass. Maybe.

Nevertheless, possibly because he looked at certain other right-wing celebrities, Michael Savage has raised the question: Are there ways to trigger a heart attack, if you know someone is vulnerable and want to "whack" him without being caught? (Well, yes...there are confirmed cases where just opening a political debate with the person has had that effect.) Would that be the perfect murder?

http://www.wnd.com/2012/03/michael-savage-was-breitbart-assassinated/

Official comment: Savage really is going out on a limb with this one. If he can produce the videos he says Breitbart had promised him, and if they're real, Savage may be the next target. If he can't, he'll be dismissed as a crackpot conspiracy theorist forevermore. Those had better be some explosive tapes. The kind of richies-at-a-party video that was circulating last summer as "likely to destroy Obama's career" will not cut it now, and the kind of you-have-to-believe-I-know-this-because-I-am-a-world-class-liar story that even Roger Morris accepted halfway, about Bill Clinton, won't cut it either. If you're claiming that someone was murdered over tapes, you'd better be talking about whatever was on the erased segment of the Nixon tapes, here.

So let's stay tuned...as the next few months either make or break Michael Savage's career.