The effort to be broadminded

I haven't posted in about a year, and one reason is that they changed the Blogger editor some months ago and, true to form, when technical people try to improve something, they make it useless and inexplicable. Time was when this facility was mostly intuitive and easy to use; now, I can hardly figure how to do half of what I once did with ease, and that's what passes for enhancement.

But to the subject of this post: as I commented to someone last week, I follow media sources all across the political spectrum—in print and online, from Redstate.com, Human Events, and Commentary, on the right, to Mother Jones and Daily Kos on the left, while my own views are somewhere between The Economist and The New Republic. Similarly, on cable news, I feel I ought to look in on everyone from Hannity and The O'Reilly Factor to Jon Stewart and Bill Maher. So tonight, I tuned into what I thought would be Hannity, intending to change to Lawrence O'Donnell at 9:00 (i.e., to go from Hannity to sanity), but to my surprise, I found some pretty young blonde hosting something called the Kelly File which, in its own way, is even farther out than the X-Files, and is so offensively stupid that I am reminded of how Elvis, in his last days, used to fire a gun at the television set. Ms. Kelly reminds me of a quote near the end of Flannery O'Connor's story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," where the Misfit says "She would have been a good woman, if there had been someone to shoot her every minute of her life." One of her guests was another pretty young woman from some college conservative organization that calls itself something like "The Association of Enlightened Women." Got it.

Anyway, I'd be happy to interact with either of these two young ladies, though in a way that I needn't describe in public and that would earn me the epithet of "old goat." I can't see that either has anything of value to add to a discussion of politics. Anyway, speaking of "old goat" reminds me of the commercials I keep seeing for something that sounds like "reptile dysfunction," though it's actually about something else. It's interesting that although the male models in these commercials are as gray as I am, the women can't possibly be a day over 45. I too would be delighted to meet someone of 45, but I hardly expect it as a universal template for social life for men my age.

And now, back to watching empty-headed Fox News pundits extol the sleazy, cynical, shameless exploitation of 80- and 90-something vets by the Tea Party to protest a shutdown that the Tea Party started in the first place.

© Michael Huggins, 2013. All rights reserved.