The Lexington Herald-Leader, like most people, has good days and bad days…or slow days, such as the one the other day when Merlene Davis, its resident race-monger, took her usual monthly or so shot at the University of Kentucky when faced with a deadline and nothing of substance to offer. She used as an example a very successful black man, Syracuse University professor Boyce Watkins, to commit her stuff vicariously…at least one supposes. He was here recently to grind her axe, notwithstanding that he graduated from UK with a triple major and later got a Masters, despite having to look after a child he fathered as he escaped high school…or did he (look after the child, that is)?
Davis didn’t mention who paid for his education, but it seems likely that he didn’t, at least for all of it or even most of it. Davis said this: “Watkins recently took a step forward in his personal life when he asked Romana Lavalas to marry him on a radio program heard by millions of listeners.” Watkins said this: “He [Bill O’Reilly] reminds me of the goofy conservatives I used to debate on the UK campus. I owe them a lot, since they prepared me for the Sean Hannitys and Rush Limbaughs of the world. So, on those grounds, I would have to say that proposing marriage was harder, especially since I did it in front of 11 million people.” One doubts that the new bride is the mother of the child mentioned above and wonders at the bona fides to register success of someone who treats marriage cavalierly enough to make a mockery of it on the radio. It was on YouTube, too, of course…EGAD! How shallow does it get?
Obviously hoping for a newspaper award of some kind, the paper recently did a front-page-above-the-fold series devoted to a druggie who managed in a very short time to bear five children, most certainly also drug-addicted, with the last one by her stepfather…a little bit of titillation via the step-incest route (called by some just “sleeping with whoever’s available”). If memory serves, she was in jail in the last accounting. The government or some other agency will, of course, raise the children. This is news? One gathers that it was supposed to be the usual tearjerker, with pity and gasps all around, perhaps designed for the “family” section. It was just nauseating.
The paper did well in an editorial recently, reminding folks that basketball is not the end-all and be-all of existence, even in Kentucky. After spending millions of dollars in 2004 in bringing Rupp Arena “into the 21st century,” the city fathers/mothers seem interested now in just assigning the arena to some sort of conference space and building a brand new Rupp across the street on a badly needed parking lot…just $200 million worth, not counting the usual cost overruns probably amounting to another $100 mil or so. Kudos to the paper for slamming this idea for what it is – nonsense on a huge scale. It reminds of the time a few years ago when the solons actually voted at least once to close Vine Street at Broadway! How do these people get elected?
A nadir of sorts was reached in the 31 October edition, when the front-page-above-the-fold “breaking-news space” was devoted to the fact that people are more likely to divorce at the five-year mark of marriage than at other times – sort of a “five-year itch” thing. The paper gave lots of reasons, but one suspects that, with the work forces gender-integrated all across the board now, the actual reason is simply the “fooling around” thing.
The nadir was enhanced exponentially in the fact that in the same edition an account remarking that the October American-death rate in Iraq (36 as of 30 October) was the lowest since March 2006 was relegated to page 14 and given a paltry 102 words. This could mean that the strategy being used now by the U.S. is working, mainly that more areas of the country are now being protected by Iraqis trained by the U.S., not to mention the Baghdad protocol (surge). This is bad news for those who adamantly have opposed the Iraqi action…thus, page 14.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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