Our distaste for the sordid fare of daytime cable TV news may not be well documented–now that would really be wasting your time–but we do get interested in some of the more broad-ranging dinner-table conversation about what gets played large and what doesn’t. About a year and a half ago, our man Clinton Collins had some interesting things to say regarding the tragic abduction (and subsquent murder) of Dru Sjodin. Sjodin, you know, was an attractive young white blond woman who worked at a mall in Grand Forks, her abductor was some sort of alien sex predator, and that kind of thing will not stand.
The hue and cry reached such a pitch that it even resonated inside the governor’s office; the guber dispatched the National Guard to help in the search, and began shaking his pom-poms for the reinstatement, after a century of limp-wristed civility, of the death penalty. Collins pointed out that this all had a hollow sound and a sour taste to African Americans around the region. Reason being that here in the city, dozens of young African American women and children disappear every year, and it barely raises the pulse of the local precinct’s desk jockey. (Collins’ piece generated a couple remarkable letters.)
Anyway, the story recurs eternally. Over in Philadelphia, the disappearance of LaToyia Figueroa, a young pregnant black woman, did not excite anyone in government or media, but after almost ten days of personal campaigning, a blogger name of Richard Cranium managed to shake the local and national media out of its mid-summer torpor, if only to make a collective ass of itself in trying between yawns to excuse its tardiness.
Anything that records and amplifies what an unpleasant self-idolator Tucker Carlson is–well, that’s just fine with us. Our impressions of daytime TV are not distinct, but we have made our views of bow ties and those who wear them very clear indeed.
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