David Bowie might remember today for two reasons. In 1974, his “Diamond Dog” tour ended in New York City …
… six years before he appeared in Denver as the title character of “The Elephant Man.”
No comments on Presty the DJ for July 19
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A friend of mine pointed out that today is the 15th anniversary of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s fatal plane crash.
Actually, as I later found out, it’s not. The plane crashed July 16, 1999, though the news was reported the next day, a Saturday.
I remember that day well, not because I was a fan of JFK Jr. or any of the Kennedys, but because I’m a media geek (but you knew that), and the unrelated events of this day demonstrate that my life is indeed powered by irony.
July 17, 1999 started really early. Mrs. Presteblog had scheduled a trip to Guatemala to visit where she served in the Peace Corps in the late 1980s. So in those halcyon pre-child days, we (that is, she and I and our two dogs, who are key to this story) stayed the night before her flight at a hotel near Mitchell Field in Milwaukee. This morning, before 5 a.m., we got up and I took her to the airport, with the dogs staying in the car for the hour or so before her flight left.
(When she flew, I always stayed at the airport until her plane left, not for any morbid reasons, but because there was one flight to Detroit when her plane left the terminal, got to the taxiway, and then turned around and came back to the terminal. The stated reason for the plane delay was bad weather; the actual reason was a slowdown by workers at the Detroit airport.)
The plane left on time, and I went back to the car to head home. On my car was a note harshly criticizing me for leaving the dogs in the car, and how badly we were treating our “poor babbies.”
I am well aware of how hot car interiors can become in the sun. Those last three words are key, however, because the car was parked in the middle of an underground parking garage on a cloudy day at 6 a.m., when the air temperature was maybe 70. There was a phone number left on the note; I thought about calling the number, but that may not have been the phone number of the note-writer, and besides that anything I had to say for explanation probably would have flown right over the writer’s head.
So I drove back home, stopping around 6:45 a.m. at the Cracker Barrel in Menomonee Falls, a great place for old-fashioned breakfasts. On the way, I was listening to WTMJ radio, which then and now has news in the morning. I’m not even sure why I was listening because there is little of actual news taking place on weekend mornings. This particular morning, Gordon Hinkley, who had worked for WTMJ for approximately the entire existence of the radio station, if not of radio itself, was doing the weekend morning news. And as I pulled into the Cracker Barrel he mentioned that a small plane piloted by John F. Kennedy Jr. was overdue at the airport into which he was supposed to fly the previous night.
These were, remember, the pre-smartphone days. Had something like this occurred today, all of us smartphone owners who cared about the news would probably be intently surfing the Web looking for news. I had a cellphone. It placed and received phone calls, and that was it. (I don’t think I could even program cute ringtones with my first cellphone.) So I ate breakfast (probably country fried steak and eggs), read the newspaper, and drove back home.
The rest of the day was consumed on TV by, you guessed it, the breaking news of the plane crash.
John F. Kennedy Jr. was famous for exactly two things — being the son of John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy, and for what he did at his father’s funeral.
I had one, and exactly one, affinity with JFK Jr. (OK, two: We both married gorgeous blondes.) At the time, I was the editor of Marketplace Magazine, and JFK Jr. started a magazine, George, that tried to be for politics what Rolling Stone was for music or GQ was for pretentious men with too much disposable income.
Later, I became the publisher and editor of Marketplace. And the same thing happened to both George and Marketplace, though at least the founder and publisher/editor of Marketplace didn’t die in the process.
At one point, ABC-TV’s Peter Jennings announced that sports events supposed to be carried on ABC were moving to ESPN2 “while we are engaged in something in which the whole country is emotionally engaged in some way or other at some time or other.” OK, it was Major League Soccer, so that was no great loss, but the coverage was the very height (or depth, if you like) of Baby Boomer self-indulgence.
John F. Kennedy Jr.’s death was covered — more like smothered — because of his famous parents, who reminded such TV anchors as Jennings, CBS’ Dan Rather and NBC’s Tom Brokaw of their younger days, and the supposed Camelot of the Kennedy presidency. (That includes President Bill Clinton, who reminded those reporters of JFK, even though the “bimbo eruptions” were of a lower class than JFK’s extramarital dalliances.) Various JFK experts were brought on to pontificate on someone who was 3 years old when his father died, so they were really talking about JFK’s father, who had died 36 years earlier.
The media doesn’t usually cover crashes of small planes in which three people die to the extent of the JFK Jr. smotherage. The media should have been embarrassed to overcover the event, but I have yet to see anyone else in the 15 years since then ask what the media was thinking when it devoted an entire day of airtime and who knows how much money to the death of someone famous merely because he was famous.
The coverage, though, was not as stupid as the “documentary” on YouTube that suggests that JFK Jr. was murdered by George W. Bush. Really.
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I have a lifelong habit of looking for something and finding something else. Here are today’s examples.
Readers know that my favorite sports announcer of all time is Dick Enberg, formerly of NBC. Enberg is known more for NFL football and college basketball (with Al McGuire and Billy Packer) than baseball. But before going to NBC, Enberg was the California Angels’ announcer.
And on July 16, 1972, Enberg announced the Angels’ game in Milwaukee County Stadium. (Actually both games, because they played a doubleheader.)
Enberg also was the Angels’ announcer in 1975, which means he was at County Stadium for my first baseball game, a 7–5 Brewers win over the Angels and their starting pitcher, Nolan Ryan, who gave up a home run to Hank Aaron. Ryan was making his second start since no-hitting Baltimore 1–0 two weeks earlier.
The Brewers’ lineup included shortstop Robin Yount and center fielder Gorman Thomas, who were still with the Brewers when they played in the 1982 World Series.
(Enberg’s on-air partner during his later Angels days was Don Drysdale, who had one of the nicest on-air personas for one of the nastiest pitchers in the history of baseball. Enberg’s excellent autobiography, Oh My!, includes details of Drysdale and Brewers announcer Bob Uecker trying to drink Enberg under the table when the Brewers met the Angels. Oh My! also includes details of how Uecker would drive Drysdale nuts by deliberately messing up Drysdale’s house on visits.)
Enberg was never a regular baseball announcer for NBC, but did several playoff series (including, bizarrely, one game from both League Championship Series in 1977) …
… and the 1982 World Series, though it seemed every time Enberg was doing play-by-play bad things were happening to the Brewers.
Enberg also announced for the Brewers — well, sort of, in the movie “Mister 3000,” which inexplicably cast Enberg instead of Uecker as the Brewers’ announcer. (Enberg’s son, actor Alexander, told his father he made a better generic baseball announcer than Uecker.)
Back to 1975, the first of Aaron’s two seasons playing for the Brewers.
The announcers on this clip are Jim Irwin, better known as the announcer of the Packers, Bucks, and Badger football and basketball teams, along with Merle Harmon, the last announcer of the Milwaukee Braves and the first announcer of the Brewers. (Uecker joined the Brewers in 1971 after one season announcing for the Atlanta Braves.)
Irwin called a later Aaron home run with Gary Bender. Irwin and Bender (or was it Bender and Irwin?) teamed up for Packer and Badger football (alternating quarters of play-by-play) in the early ’70s, and the Brewers in the 1975 season. Irwin worked for WTMJ TV and radio, and Bender worked for WTMJ radio while the sports director for WKOW-TV in Madison, until he left Wisconsin for CBS. WTMJ-TV was the Brewers’ TV outlet for their first 11 seasons, and WTMJ radio has carried the Brewers all but two years of their existence. (Those also were the Brewers’ first two playoff seasons, for what it’s worth.)
Bender was the number-two baseball announcer for ABC after he moved there from CBS. Irwin, who counted as his broadcasting influences Harry Caray (who did both college football and the NBA in addition to baseball), substituted for Uecker after Uecker missed part of a season for health reasons in the late 1980s.
WTMJ-TV was the first commercial TV station in Wisconsin, and for many years had the only mobile production truck in the southern half of the state. As a result WTMJ’s truck could be found at, among other places, the WIAA state basketball tournaments at the UW Fieldhouse, even though WTMJ didn’t carry the state tournament after 1969. A decade before that, WTMJ’s equipment and employees shot the 1957 and 1958 World Series games at Milwaukee County Stadium for NBC.
The same year as the two Aaron home runs, Hammerin’ Hank was chosen for the 1975 All-Star Game …
… played at County Stadium. Aaron’s teammate, first baseman George “Boomer” Scott, also played in the game.
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It is difficult to remember a time when you could scroll through the social media outlet of your choice and not be bombarded with:
You’ll never believe what happened when…
This is the cutest thing ever…
This the biggest mistake you can make…
Take this quiz to see which character you are on…
They are all classic clickbait models. And they are irritating as hell. There’s no singular way to craft clickbait, but the essence is clear: Lure—no, trick—readers to your site.
“It’s social copy specifically intended to leave out information to create a curiosity gap. Some of it’s disingenuous. It’s not always, but the reader is always being manipulated,” says Jake Beckman, the man behind @SavedYouAClick, the Twitter feed devoted to “saving you from clickbait.”
In its few months of existence, @SavedYouAClick has amassed 125,000 followers, a sign of increasing frustration. And @SavedYouAClick is hardly the only fighter in the anti-clickbait crusade. It follows on the heels of other Twitter accounts, like @HuffPoSpoilers and @UpworthySpoiler, designed to call out and mock clickbait culture.
The clickbait backlash on various forms of social media is not only incredibly meta, but perhaps on first glance, overly dramatic. Yes, clickbait content is annoying, but is it harmful? “Clickbait is OK if you’re entertaining and have some personality with it,” says Alex Mizrahi, the founder of @HuffPoSpoilers.
Beckman also argues that Clickbait isn’t quite a recent, solely social media-driven phenomenon. “The concept of using ‘shouty journalism’ to move the needle isn’t new,” he says and cites the street corner newsies. “‘Extra, extra read all about it!’ That was trying to sensationalize a story. This [clickbait] is just the modern equivalent.”
But there is something more insidious to clickbait because it is based on the premise that “readers are being treated as stupid,” says Beckman. And this trend of duping and manipulating readers is becoming the unfortunate online news standard. Once the domain of Huffington Post, Upworthy, and BuzzFeed, old-school journalistic institutions, such as The New York Times, Washington Post, and the Associated Press are also relying on clickbait. And that’s what is so frustrating and, frankly, a little disturbing, to those seeking the news. …
“How can you be taken seriously when you leave out the ‘who, what, where, why, [and] how’ when it’s relevant to the news story,” says Mizrahi. “It’s obvious you can’t fit the whole story, [but] you have to give context. You can’t fall back on the same formulas.”
The incentives for even the most respected news agencies to rely on clickbait are obvious: traffic. “The bottom line for publishers is that digital media is still trying to find its footing in the revenue game, and revenue is largely dependent on how much traffic and how many uniques [number of distinct visitors going to a website during a certain time period] you get,” says Beckman.
While building an audience has always been the name of the game for a publication, in the current world of online news, the value of a regular, loyal readership has diminished financially. “Brand loyalty doesn’t matter. Advertisers care about bringing new readers into the fold,” says Beckman.
But as the increasing backlash against clickbait shows, the short-term gains in unique views may cost news sites in the long run. It’s not only Twitter accounts, but entire sites built around the making fun of the clickbait culture are becoming increasingly popular. The Onion’s ClickHole has been operating for less than a month and has already earned readers and praise for its skewering of BuzzFeed and Upworthy-esque listicles and quizzes. While ClickHole mocks the drive for viral content rather than merely tweets, it alludes to the same problem as @SavedYouAClick and @HuffPoSpoilers: the constant drive for clickability. …
This growing clickbait awareness may ultimately cost news agencies that are gunning for short-term gains. With “a whole generation of users [getting] their news online,” he warns there could be a critical mass of cynical readers may lose their trust in these sources. “In the news industry, you want repeat business with your reputation, and publishers are gambling with their reputation.”
Perhaps ironically, the next piece on The Daily Beast was “Hamas Has Already Won Its Rocket War with Israel,” which would seem to be obvious, though less blatant, clickbait.
Certainly readers are being treated as stupid, and perhaps because some readers are stupid. What other possible explanation exists for this?
That’s right. People who presumably reproduce, and may even vote, believe that Steven Spielberg killed a dinosaur that hasn’t walked the planet for 66 million years.
As far as clickbait goes, though, the Daily Beast (formerly known as Newsweek, by the way) correctly points out that predecessors of clickbait have existed for the entire history of mass media. The New York Post with the screaming front-page headline “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR” probably sold very, very well that day. The U.S. is too puritan to have Britain’s Page 3 Girls — women in various states of undress — but London’s tabloids are not. Magazines have tried to push single-copy sales through their cover designs — big type and fabulous babes or hunks — ever since they were able to print color covers. TV stations are as guilty when they try to amp up news ratings during the sweeps periods with lurid stories of dubious actual news value. Take a walk through the romance fiction section a bookstore for further evidence.
Clickbait, however, violates one basic rule of business: It is five times as costly to get a new customer as it is to keep a customer. Increasing readership through churn is hard work, and eventually reaches a point of negative returns.
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Fighting Bob’s favorite nominal Republican, Bill Kraus, raises a point that should be made more often:
In the current four-person race for Attorney General of Wisconsin there have been some disturbing suggestions that candidates for that office may opt in or out of cases based on what they consider the virtue of the laws on which the cases are based.
And the ongoing tainted John Doe controversy is partisan infected at the very least.
This isn’t the kind of partisanism and ideological bias that dominates the first and second estates, but it seems to me to be headed in that direction.
Contests in judicial elections elsewhere have been influenced, even decided, by something that looks like prejudging based on something other than the facts or the interpretation of legislation which are supposed to be the main or even the only criteria in play in these quarters.
A partial remedy or at least a treatment for these deleterious trends has been suggested for those members of the third estate who gain office through elections.
Their elections can, and I think should, be moved from the partisan fall to the non-partisan spring.
Judicial elections are already there in Wisconsin.
The rest of the offices whose reason for being is law enforcement should be as well.
Sheriffs, district attorneys, and even attorneys general are not in the policy business. They enforce laws others write, keep the peace, and punish the miscreants among us.
Politics is not a part of their jobs. Political affiliation is irrelevant to their job performance.
Moving them to the non-partisan election spring date would make that distinction more evident to the voters.
That would mean, of course, that county offices — sheriffs, district attorneys, clerks, treasurers, registers of deeds and coroners — be nonpartisan offices. The only reason for county offices to be partisan offices is because they’ve always been partisan offices since statehood. That doesn’t mean there has ever been a valid rationale for them to be partisan offices.
Some would argue those offices shouldn’t be elective offices. At a minimum, the services those county offices provide should not change based on whether the office-holder has a D or an R after his or her name. (See Milwaukee County District Attorney, John Doe investigation.) Democrats or Republicans are so entrenched in many counties of this state that there is no competition for those positions, since one way to get out of favor with the local party in power is to run against its incumbents. The accountability of elections diminishes greatly in such a situation except when the incumbent retires. (Including retirement by death, which sometimes happens.)
There is a long tradition in this nation of having elected county positions, particularly sheriffs, because the sheriffs of England were not elected and thus not accountable to the citizens. Sheriffs in this state are the top law enforcement authority of their county, over even the State Patrol or other state law enforcement. If, the argument goes, we elect people to create our laws, we should also elect people to enforce those laws, or at least those who manage those who enforce those laws, because those who are dissatisfied with their work can vote for a different sheriff next election.
The flip side is that sheriffs are politicians, and politicians do whatever they have to to keep their offices. (For that matter, while district attorneys are required to be attorneys, sheriffs are not required to have any law enforcement experience. Older readers may recall William Ferris, Dane County’s sheriff from 1972 to 1980, elected at 32 with no previous law enforcement experience, though he had six years of Dane County Board experience. Ferris, who was just 41 when he died of cancer in 1980, claimed to be an administrator, not a cop. Indeed, sheriffs may have been police officers or deputy sheriffs, but sheriffs don’t run radar or even investigate crimes, contrary to what you watch on A&E’s “Longmire.”)
You may think the answer is shorter terms or term limits. Wisconsin sheriffs used to have two-year terms until 2003, and they used to be limited to two terms until the 1960s. Proving that sheriffs are indeed politicians, sheriffs got around those laws (as politicians always find ways to get around laws designed to curb their power) by getting their wives (who often served as the county jail cook) or sons elected sheriff, and then having the new sheriff appoint the old sheriff as undersheriff, which was a non-civil service position. (That, however, resulted in at least one election pitting father against son for sheriff.)
I’m not a fan of the April elections. For consistency, the spring elections should be moved to November in odd-numbered years, to distinguish from the November even-numbered-year elections for president, governor, Congress and the Legislature, such as the one coming up in four months. On the other hand, April elections are closer to Tax Day; in fact, I’d like to see property and income taxes due to be paid on election days, to make clear the connection between your taxes and your vote.
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Two Beatles anniversaries of note today: The movie “Yellow Submarine” premiered in London …
… six years before John Lennon was ordered to leave the U.S. within 60 days. (He didn’t.)
Birthdays today start with pianist Vince Guaraldi. Who? The creator of the Charlie Brown theme (correct name: “Linus and Lucy”):
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Journalists are, or certainly should be, keepers of proper use of the English language — even if the rest of the world around them barely qualifies as “English-speaking.”
Weird Al Yankovic is on our side:
(Apparently Weird Al based this on a Robin Thicke sign, “Blurred Lines.” I’m happy I didn’t know that. Most music today is a #soundcrime.)
Another thing the print world gets to deal with is people’s inability, or refusal, to punctuate properly, as reported by Farhad Manjoo:
Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.
And yet people who use two spaces are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste.* You’d expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you’d be wrong; every third email I get from readers includes the two-space error. (In editing letters for “Dear Farhad,” my occasional tech-advice column, I’ve removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) The public relations profession is similarly ignorant; I’ve received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces. Some of my best friends are irredeemable two-spacers, too, and even my wife has been known to use an unnecessary extra space every now and then (though she points out that she does so only when writing to other two-spacers, just to make them happy). …
The people who study and design the typewritten word decided long ago that we should use one space, not two, between sentences. That convention was not arrived at casually. James Felici, author of the The Complete Manual of Typography, points out that the early history of type is one of inconsistent spacing. Hundreds of years ago, some typesetters would end sentences with a double space, others would use a single space, and a few renegades would use three or four spaces. Inconsistency reigned in all facets of written communication; there were few conventions regarding spelling, punctuation, character design, and ways to add emphasis to type. But as typesetting became more widespread, its practitioners began to adopt best practices. Felici writes that typesetters in Europe began to settle on a single space around the early 20th century. America followed soon after.
Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It’s one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men’s shirt buttons on the right and women’s on the left. Every major style guide—including theModern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style—prescribes a single space after a period. (The Publications Manual of the American Psychological Association, used widely in the social sciences, allows for two spaces in draft manuscripts but recommends one space in published work.) Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule, too, if it weren’t for a quirk of history. In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology—the manual typewriter—invaded the American workplace. To accommodate that machine’s shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do. (Also see the persistence of the dreaded Caps Lock key.)
The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type—that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks “loose” and uneven; there’s a lot of white space between characters and words, so it’s more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here’s the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we’ve all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.
Truth be told, though, fixing double spaces is relatively easy for someone who has Microsoft Word, or any other word processing software, or even just a Find and Change function on software. Type two spaces into “Find,” type one space into “Replace,” and your problem should be fixed … except for those who, instead of using tabs or indenting, type several spaces to move type over from the left margin on a page.
Fixing bad grammar and spelling takes much more time. You can do that in print, but it’s difficult to tell someone that the plural of “you” is not “yous,” and if you want to find out something you don’t “ax” someone. It’s particularly annoying to fix the writing or someone who thinks he or she is a good writer, but isn’t. The PlainLanguage.gov website (yes, it exists) has examples of how to write good:
- Avoid Alliteration. Always.
- Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
- Avoid cliches like the plague. (Theyre old hat.)
- Employ the vernacular.
- Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
- Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
- It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
- Contractions arent necessary.
- Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
- One should never generalize.
- Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
- Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
- Dont be redundant; dont use more words than necessary; its highly superfluous.
- Profanity sucks.
- Be more or less specific.
- Understatement is always best.
- Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
- One word sentences? Eliminate.
- Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
- The passive voice is to be avoided.
- Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
- Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
- Who needs rhetorical questions?
- Parenthetical words however must be enclosed in commas.
- It behooves you to avoid archaic expressions.
- Avoid archaeic spellings too.
- Don’t repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.
- Don’t use commas, that, are not, necessary.
- Do not use hyperbole; not one in a million can do it effectively.
- Never use a big word when a diminutive alternative would suffice.
- Subject and verb always has to agree.
- Placing a comma between subject and predicate, is not correct.
- Use youre spell chekker to avoid mispeling and to catch typograhpical errers.
- Don’t repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.
- Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed.
- Don’t never use no double negatives.
- Poofread carefully to see if you any words out.
- Hopefully, you will use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
- Eschew obfuscation.
- No sentence fragments.
- Don’t indulge in sesquipedalian lexicological constructions.
- A writer must not shift your point of view.
- Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
- Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
- Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
- If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
- Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
- Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
- Always pick on the correct idiom.
- The adverb always follows the verb.
- Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
- If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.
- And always be sure to finish what
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Charles C.W. Cooke proves that liberals are humorless:
Nineteen terrifying words from the Omaha World-Herald:
The U.S. Department of Justice has joined the discussions over a controversial float in the Norfolk Independence Day parade.
Thus did the federal government dispatch an emissary to investigate a minor instance of Midwestern dissent.
A quick recap for the happily uninitiated: The “controversial float” in question was one of many included in this year’s Independence Day parade in Norfolk, Neb. The entry, which featured a zombie standing on an outhouse marked “Obama Presidential Library,” was created by a veteran named Dale Remmich, and was designed, Remmich claims, to express the “political disgust” that he feels at the Obama administration’s mismanagement of the Department of Veteran Affairs. As is the habit now, pictures of the float were quickly pushed around the Internet, attracting the attention and disapprobation of such august institutions as the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, and the Huffington Post — and, it seems, the interest of the United States Department of Justice. This week, the World-Herald reports, the DOJ “sent a member of its Community Relations Service team, which gets involved in discrimination disputes, to a Thursday meeting about the issue.” Present at the summit were the NAACP, the mayor of the Nebraska town in which the float was displayed, and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, which sponsored the event.
Now for the obvious question: Why? What, exactly, was the problem here? Nobody was killed. Nobody was maimed. Nobody had their material or spiritual interests injured, nor were they stripped of their livelihoods. No federal or state laws were broken. Indeed, not even private rules were broken. More to the point, there was no “discrimination dispute” of the sort with which the DOJ likes to concern itself. Instead, a few free people were vexed because a politician that they like was depicted in an unflattering light. One might well ask, “So what?” Once, Americans tackled the Oregon Trail. Are they now in need of their political “discussions” being arbitrated by glorified social workers sent by Uncle Sam?
In a typically risible statement, Nebraska’s state Democratic party described the incident as one of the “worst shows of racism and disrespect for the office of the presidency that Nebraska has ever seen.” That this is almost certainly true demonstrates just how much progress the United States has made in the last 50 years — and, in consequence, how extraordinarily difficult the professionally aggrieved are finding it to fill their quotas. If a fairly standard old saw is among the worst things to have happened to the Cornhusker State in recent memory, the country is in rather good shape, n’est-ce pas?
Exactly what it was about the float that rendered it “racist” was, of course, never explained. Instead, the assertion was merely thrown into the ether, ready to be accepted uncritically by the legions of righteously indignant keyboard warriors that lurk around social media as piranhas around a fresh carcass. But, for future reference at least, it would be nice to have the details of the offense unpacked. Are outhouses racist now? Are zombies? Or was it perhaps the overalls in which the zombie was dressed? Moreover, if any of these are now redolent of something sinister, at what point was this association held to be operative? A popular cartoon from 2006 depicted a latrine standing in the middle of the desert, on its outer wall the words “Bush Presidential Library.” Was this “racist,” or is this one of those timeless truths that were only discovered in 2009? …
Frankly, as superficially appealing as they might sound, appeals to “the dignity of the office” are invariably prissy, serving more often than not as a means by which humorless partisans might grumble about their team’s being dinged without appearing hypersensitive. Indeed, far from damaging the national fabric, astringent mockery of the powerful is a healthy and necessary thing — a source of valuable catharsis that serves also as a canary in the proverbial coal mine. When I see the most powerful man in the country being not only mocked, but hanged and burned in effigy too, my first thought is less “gosh, how awful” than “wow, is this a free country or what?” A historical rule of thumb: If a ragtag group of political dissenters can simulate the violent execution of the head of the executive branch and not be so much as scratched as a result, the country is a free one. Who cares if a few of our more delicate sorts reach for the smelling salts?
It is always tempting to believe one’s own time to be particularly interesting or fractious, but there is little in politics that is genuinely new. Sharp and violent denunciations of the executive branch have been a feature of American life since the republic’s first days. Before the Revolution, the colonists routinely hanged likenesses of unpopular royal representatives, including King George III; Andrew Oliver, the Massachusetts Distributor of Stamps; and the loyalist Supreme Court justice, Thomas Hutchinson. Afterward, having dispensed with the old guard, Americans took to lambasting the new, among them George Washington, who had effected the king’s defeat; Thomas Jefferson, who had authored the charter of separation; and James Madison, who had drafted the lion’s share of the new Constitution. Chief Justice John Jay’s 1795 treaty with the British was so wildly unpopular among the Jeffersonians that Jay reported being able to travel from Boston to Philadelphia by the light of his burning effigies. Later, during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was subjected to the treatment. In one form or another, most presidents have been.
Of course, anyone who makes fun of Hillary Clinton has been called sexist for some time. For that matter, you can even create a film depicting the assassination of a current president and win awards, as long as that president is a Republican. Try that now, and you’ll go into the Secret Service gulag, never to be seen or heard from again.
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This is a slow day in rock music, save for one particular birthday and one death.
It’s not Tony Jackson of the Searchers …
… or Tom Boggs, drummer for the Box Tops …
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
