Our revels now are ended
The turkey is now just sandwiches, the relatives are dispatched back to their homes and work, the Wal-Mart is cramped with cranky customers fighting over the $40.00 Gameboys and the dancing, singing Dora the Explorer dolls, and countless carcasses of dead deer hang lifeless in countless woodsheds all across Virginia and West Virginia. Thanksgiving is finished for another year.
For the first time, my wife’s family drove six hours to visit us for the holiday. Usually, we are the ones driving six hours to visit them; but I think we have now begun a new tradition. They enjoyed themselves, especially the part about not having to cook or clean the house, and so they promised to return every Thanksgiving for the foreseeable future.
As for my family, my Grandpa killed two bucks within the first hour of the first day of season last week. He went hunting on a friend’s property in Wirt County (near where Jessica Lynch was born and raised, if you’re interested). He shot an eight point soon after entering the woods. After dragging it out, he went back into the woods and shot a six point, too. His brother is unable to hunt this year because of a heart condition, and so Grandpa used his permit to kill the second buck.
Grandpa uses an old lever action .30-.30 Winchester (no scope) such as Chuck Connors used to use in one of my favorite western TV programs, The Rifleman. Grandpa’s rifle doesn’t have the Rifleman’s modification, though. Grandpa can’t fire just by working the lever.
As for me, this Thanksgiving I just ate a lot, and despite the fact that the verdict is still out on whether the tryptophan in turkey is really enough to induce drowsiness, from Thursday through last night, I fell asleep every night soon after dinner. There must be something in that turkey that can put in a man in a drooling coma minutes after eating.
Now that my week of “news celibacy” is nearly over, I must consider where to go from here in my writing on this blog. Do I keep it general, or do I shift to a more specific purpose, such as monitoring conservative talk radio. I am inclined towards the generalist point of view. It’s easier to write about a diverse range of topics, for one thing, but being jack of all trades also undercuts the effectiveness of any message. A site with a specific theme, purpose, or goal is better at garnering readers and attention to a cause.
To that end, I might be better off restarting my old blogger blog as my “media watch dog” website. Looking at all the categories covered by this blog, I fear that anything I have to say on the subject of conservative radio would be diluted by the number of words devoted to everything else that interests me.
So I have a lot to consider this week. I’ll probably write some on the news, as little as there is of it currently. And as always, I am going to be questioning what I believe, probing my understanding of events for holes and flaws. Unfortunately, I will never be a person who has “core beliefs” (the Republican catch-phrase of the day) which are immutable by time and circumstance. I’ve come to that conclusion after years of flip-flopping. I am who I am, and that’s all that I am, as some famous sailor once said.
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Tell me, does your father eat all that venison, or would he consider helping some of us who are less fortunate?
We depend on Dawn’s father picking up a fresh road-killed deer every year for venison and he has been lagging recently.
Comment by Todd — Sunday, 28 November 2004 @ 11:36 am
I struggle with the same thing, actually. I constantly ask myself what I can contribute to the cacophony of the Internet. I came to the conclusion that the only true thing I can write about is what I know — the oddities and foibles of the people I know and the things I observe in my day to day life. Offline, I struggle to become more informed about issues so I don’t sound like an idiot. I don’t have any appetite for fumbling in front of an Internet audience, though I admire those who do.
I’m afraid that I’ll have to continue my way as a serial commenter. I can add to the conversation of the Internet without cluttering my site with my lack of insights.
Comment by Zesmerelda — Sunday, 28 November 2004 @ 11:43 am
oops. grandfather….
Comment by Todd — Sunday, 28 November 2004 @ 11:43 am
I think as long as you think you’re serving a purpose, regardless of who’s reading it, you’re fine.
You’ve been at this a while, and you offer some insightful comments into politics, as well as your reflections on who you’ve become, politically.
Yeah, there are a lot of sites already out there. But they’re not yours, to do with what you will.
Not everyone gets to listen to talk radio. Me personally — I can’t stomach the stuff. I’m better able to read than listen. I can do it faster.
And then I found out I moved to an area where the NPR station really only plays classical music with the occasional program thrown in there later in the day. I’m so sad.
Comment by Mel B. — Sunday, 28 November 2004 @ 1:49 pm
It all gets eaten. Grandpa ends up giving a lot of it away to friends and relatives, though.
Comment by Matthew — Sunday, 28 November 2004 @ 3:24 pm
My feeling is conservative radio is a very powerful and pernicious force in American politics today. There ought to be some counter-weight to it; and I don’t buy the conservative claim that “the liberal media” is properly that counterweight. There is no liberal media anymore. If the mainstream press has a liberal slant, it is hampered and diluted by the desire to appear (if not be) objective. Whereas cnservative radio has no obligation or desire towards objectivity. I’ve been thinking for awhile that what we rally need is not an “objective” mainstream media, but a media in which all biases are out in the open. This would be better than what we’ve got. Two competing visions are better than one vision (the conservative vision) and one pale, inhibited imitation of a vision (liberalism).
Comment by Matthew — Sunday, 28 November 2004 @ 3:30 pm
Whooooa! Never advocate bringing those biases out in the open! People already have enough bad attitudes about the media to let them know what they’ve always thought!
Seriously, I think when people trash the media, whether liberal or conservative, they’re really talking about television, for the most part. Radio isn’t as big a player — but then, maybe I’ve not been exposed to conservative radio, and thankfully so. Though since NPR is allegedly liberal, that means I’ve been getting the other side.
Anyway, newspapers do a somewhat better job of not being biased. That’s what I think, anyway.
Newspapers often get accused of having a bias one way or the other, but most try as best as they can, to be more objective.
The managing editor at my old paper was SO concerned that we appear neutral that during the presidential election, we couldn’t just run a picture of Bush or Kerry just because it was the best picture of the day. We had to be very careful in our appearance to the public. For an election centerpiece one day, I was told, oh, we can go ahead and use Kerry big and Bush smaller because blah blah. And I said, that’s so not going to get past the managing editor.
I quietly started on my contingency plan, which sucked, and consisted of running pictures of the them side by side, the same size, and making sure they were the same proportions in the photo. And sure enough, an hour later, when someone brightly told the managing editor what the original plan was, he exploded. Here comes plan B.
We also had to be careful not to make one or the other candidate look better or worse than the other.
You’d be suprised the kind of people you get working in a newsroom. We’re just people. We bring our own biases. But we cancel each other out. We had some very vocal conservatives working for us. Our managing editor tends to be liberal, but our publisher, who could be an anvil of judgment, was extremely conservative.
But our job, as a paper, was to try to cover things as objectively as we could.
That continues to be a struggle for newspapers. A lot of them appear in the community to be one way or the other. It may be that some of them overstep their roles in the community, and do openly show their bias. But then people are definitely aware of that bias. We once had a guy accuse us of making Bush look stupid, showing us a photo he’d cut out of the paper. Long story, but I privately thought that, well, he always looks like that.
But then we have people write in that say we’re way too conservative.
Personally, I thought my old paper tended to err on the side of conservatism, though there were issues that they were progressive about.
My new paper, I don’t have a good sense on that yet. But I’m told by my liberal boss that the paper is conservative, and when I came to interview, the executive editor said the paper is very liberal.
So take your pick.
I think it’s the job of the media to cover issues the best they can. Maybe we SHOULDN’T have opinions in the media, through talk radio or tv shows, especially (though there are opinion columns in the paper, too). That’d cut down the amount of vicious crap coming out from both sides.
Anyway, sorry for the long rant. Maybe I’m naive about newspapers. But they are something that I continue to think serve a purpose in objectivity. Showing my bias.
Comment by Mel B. — Monday, 29 November 2004 @ 1:01 pm
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Comment by poker party — Thursday, 1 September 2005 @ 11:13 pm