Associations

A while back I mentioned a photography contest that I entered and in which I won second prize. In addition to a cash prize, the winning photographs were to be published in an issue of a local magazine later that month. That issue arrived in our mailbox last Wednesday and I was quick to grab it, find the page with the contest winners on it, and swear vengeance upon the adorable baby in the First Prize photo. Then finding myself with the magazine open in my hands I did something I’d actually never done before: I read it.

I was pretty shocked by what I found in the pages surrounding a picture of my daughter. It was actually the “Letters to the Editor, the first thing I turned to, that acted as a splash of cold, liquid lunacy on my still smiling face. Besides a couple of letters praising the magazine for it support of a proposition to bring clean, fresh rulers to Mrs. Brixby’s Fourth Grade Class out in Hootenville, the reader contributions to this particular column consisted of big buckets of crazy heaped upon the results of the recent midterm election.

And I’m not just talking about gruff old timers sitting around a checker board and grousing about higher taxes and Slick Willie (though Bill Clinton, who did not run in this last election as far as I know, was inexplicably included amongst one reader’s bulleted list of rapid fire complaints). These were WAY out there. The kinds of things that you might expect from some bearded and wild eyed hermit, naked except for a John Deere cap and cranking out missives in his hidden cabin with the help of an old mimeograph machine and jars of his own bodily fluid. Here’s one example:

Think about it. Al-Quaida and the radical Islamo-Faschists are very happy to see what happened in our election. What does that tell you?

Remember, if they could have voted, the terrorists would have voted for Democrats.

Beware, the country now is at great peril, from now-happier terrorists and from within the 535 seats in Congress.

I often have considered the American populace as politically naive, clearly worldly simplistic, but with a remarkable tendency to behave as though they were sheep. The Nov. 7 election is but the latest evidence.

Okaaaay… The irony of that last one makes my eyes sting. There’s more that goes on about the liberal press and Democratic conspiracies to aid the Terrorists (pronounce that word without any vowel sounds for best effect) and plunge us all into Communism, but I think you get the idea. I kept flipping through the pages of the magazine looking for a competing viewpoint to balance things out, maybe a big headline like “Magazine Sponsor Barbara Streisand Offers Readers Free Admission to 2006 Abortion-thon!” But no luck.

I don’t want to turn this blog or even this post into a “my side vs. your side” debate more appropriate to a baseball game than an election. Truth is I’m conservative on some issues, liberal on some, moderate on some, and don’t give a flip about the rest. So let’s not go there. It’s just that the letters to the editor and some of the other editorial columns struck me as really extreme and not the kind of things I’d normally read. But to help Samantha fit in with her fellow magazine contributors, I’d like to present the most patriotic picture I have of her:

They’re so cute until they they grow up to support the terrorists by voting Democrat, aren’t they?