My Chance at the Guinness Book of World Records! – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, I always thought it would be cool to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. I suppose many kids of that era did. Readers old enough to remember will recall the actual physical book; that is, its look and its ubiquitousness. Whoever published it must have sold a billion copies of the damned thing. They were everywhere. My mental image — perhaps like many of yours — is a tan-colored paperback jacket with a globe on the cover (click here).

In between the front and back covers were all sorts of neat records, some of them impressive and others downright weird. There was everything from the longest beard, mustache, and fingernails to the fattest, tallest, and shortest man. There was everything from egg tossing to weightlifting to dwarf tossing (incidentally, a longtime favorite sport of The American Spectator, which we chronicled in the 1980s).

Growing up in the now-famous Butler, Penn., me and my buddies had a local inspiration when it came to finding creative ways to set world records. That person was the legendary Abie Abraham. He was quite the character. Until the day he died in March 2012 at the ripe old age of 98, this son of Syrian immigrants (one of 11 children) every day walked loops inside the lengthy Clearview Mall, capturing the attention of all with his friendliness and jean jacket adorned with World War II medals.

Abie had survived the hellacious Bataan Death March, plus another three years in a brutal Japanese POW camp. His story of perseverance is incredible. If you’d like to read a page-turning account of what the Purple Heart recipient and his band of brothers went through, get a copy of Hampton Sides’s gripping book, Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II’s Most Dramatic Mission. Abie made it home from Bataan to Butler, where he spent his remaining days living in peace as a local hero.

What does this have to do with world records? I shall tell you!

Before Abie was shipped off to the Pacific theater, he had already made history. He held the record for the longest period of time sitting in a tree. Yes, an epic performance. Presumably, he hauled up food provided by friends and family and found a way to relieve himself when nature called from the treetops.

Abie Abraham was very much a Butler marvel in many ways.

As a boy growing up in Butler, I looked for a way to get into the vaunted Guinness Book. Many boys throughout America surely had similar aspirations.

Actually, our venerable founder of The American Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., had run-ins with world record holders. Tyrrell was an excellent swimmer, so much so that he went to Indiana University in Bloomington to swim under the legendary Doc Counsilman. Anyone who knows anything about swimming knows that Counsilman was peerless. He was the Knute Rockne of swimming. Counsilman had coached more record holders and Olympians than any swim coach ever, including close Tyrrell friend and beloved longtime The American Spectator board member, Dr. Al Somers.

Tyrrell himself never broke a record for swimming, though his magazine boasts 58 years of battling what he famously dubbed the Kultursmog. That’s a worthy feat that merits acknowledgment. Tyrrell, for nearly 60 years, has tossed sand in the shorts of what he long ago termed the “wombistic left.” That’s not merely infantile liberalism, mind you, but wombistic liberalism. That would be pre-infantile.

Anyway, back to my own efforts.

Needless to say, I never made it into the Guinness Book of World Records. But that may soon change, thanks in no small part to, indeed, wombistic leftists.

Since the August 2024 release of the Reagan movie starring Dennis Quaid — based on one of my books on Ronald Reagan — I’ve chronicled the temper tantrums of left-wing reviewers who trashed our masterful cinematic work because of their hateful politics. In point of fact, it would be accurate to label these critics wombistic because most were actually in their mothers’ wombs when The Gipper was peacefully winning the Cold War. They were comfortably bumping inside their mothers’ uteruses when East Berliners were joyously hammering the Berlin Wall. (RELATED: Hollywoke: The Motion Picture Academy of Bigotry)

The critics demonstrated in their reviews that their knowledge of the Reagan presidency in the 2020s is equal to what it was in their mothers’ wombs in the 1980s. Actually, their ignorance is worse than that. It was thanks to Ronald Reagan — and allies like Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II — that these ingrates were born into a world without nuclear war, the Soviet Union, or the Iron Curtain. They went from their wombs to their government schools to their terrible universities without learning anything of that grand victory, and now they write movie reviews oblivious to historical realities.

And yet there are still greater displays of this infantile liberalism: I noted in a recent column that the wokesters now running and ruining the Motion Picture Academy disqualified Reagan and a hundred-plus other films because they failed to meet the Academy’s insane new DEI standards. Our big mistake with the Reagan film: We didn’t make George Shultz a cross-dresser or Dick Darman and Jim Baker gay lovers.

Alas, we could not twist the historical record the way the wokesters wanted. For reporting history accurately, we were penalized by the woke.

But let me finally get to the good news — that is, about Guinness. And behold, the Reagan movie is, ironically, the source of this potential achievement.

Hollywood’s leftist reviewers are such an ideologically biased and politically monolithic lot that their abysmal rating of the Reagan movie is at the farthest opposite extreme of everyday moviegoers. How much so? Well, unprecedentedly so. The film has an extraordinary 98 percent audience approval from the film-scoring Rotten Tomatoes website, compared to a dreadful 18 percent critics rating. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the largest gap between audience and critics in the history of Rotten Tomatoes.

In fact, the degree to which this gap is so unprecedented seems to be — yes, yes — an all-time world record! Perhaps Guinness Book-worthy.

Such is the informed, astute judgment of the film’s intrepid producer, Mark Joseph. Mark told the New York Post that he plans to apply for a Guinness World Record for “greatest disparity between everyday viewers’ and critics’ approval of a movie.”

To this I say, do it! Go, Mark, go.

Now, that’s a world record I would be especially proud to be part of. Not only because of the role of my book in the film, but because the record would reveal the shameful biases, outrageous unprofessionalism, and the political petulance of Hollywood’s wombistic leftists. They place personal ideology above art. Their blatant partisan hackery, utterly unbecoming of professionals in the cinematic arts, is of record-breaking proportions.

For now, I shall wait. I’m sure I’ll never hold an Oscar, but I would cherish a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.

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