...and a depressing New Year

There are many who have said that reading the daily newspaper is an absolutely depressing experience, but there were items in today's news digests that made me worry about the prospects for the other 364 days of this year.

Perhaps it's just me, but not one single candidate for President--Republican, Democrat or possible Independent--has stirred any kind of excitement in my aging veins. Of course I could be asking myself why this year should be any different than the last 40, but at a time when this country seems in desperate need of a leader to rally around, that leader seems nowhere to be found. At least in past years, I was almost driven to the polls just in case there was a "None of the above" category, but this group doesn't even inspire me to do that. Worse than that, I can't think of anyone out there who is not a candidate that I wish would run. It really is a sorry state of affairs.

I would rather the FBI leave the fate of D.B. Cooper to our imaginations. I like the idea of unanswered questions because they make great topics for conversations and debates. Could he and did he survive his leap from the hijacked airplane 36 years ago? If he did survive, what did he do with this life? What did he do with the money? And, if we did get officials answers, would that have an adverse effect on one of Todd Snider's best songs? I'm afraid the only thing an official FBI report would accomplish would be to open the floodgates for a bunch of pseudos authoring tomes debunking the findings.

The last sentence of first paragraph of the lead editorial in today's Dallas Morning News says the "Without question (the federal indictments against Don Hill, James Fantroy et al) was a low point for public confidence in City Hall." That's simply not true. It may have shaken the confidence the public has in certain elected officials, but the News must find better ways of identification. When I think of City Hall, I think of those thousands of dedicated city workers, the majority of whom will have tenures longer than any elected city official. The elected officials are not City Hall, they are transients renting office space in City Hall for a limited amount of time. City Hall is the city manager, the director of streets, water, public works, the guys out there filling potholes and chasing stray animals, that wonderful Unsung Hero I ran into as I was leaving for work at 7:20 a.m. when the temperature was in the high 20s who was collecting my recycling, a Hero probably doing double duty since my regular recycling pickup day was yesterday, a holiday. That's City Hall to me even though My Hero probably never has set foot inside the building known as City Hall. Not only that, the majority of those indicted were not even elected officials. I know from spending too many years inside the media, that writers/reporters take lazy shortcuts. For example, any collision between two aircraft not on the ground will be referred to as "a midair collision," even though no one has pinpointed--at least to my knowledge--exactly where "midair" is. Or they will toss around words like "famed" as in a cutline under a picture on Page 11c of today's news that shows "the famed Kilgore Rangerettes." Webster defines "famed' as "known widely and well." So, if someone or something is "famed," you don't need to tell me so. Usually, when a journalist uses the term "famed" what the writer means is "You probably haven't heard of this person before but I've got to justify the fact that I'm writing all these laudatory comments about the person so I will do so by calling him 'famed'." At any rate, the News referring to the indictments as "the City Hall scandal" is terribly misleading and an injustice against a lot of fine people who work for the city.

And, speaking of of editorials, what's with all these gushing comments over a Texas Transportation Commission Chairman who, as far as I could see, did nothing in the area of mass transportation, specifically high-speed rail transportation. Instead of a Trans-Texas Corridor, I would much rather be able to get on a train in downtown Dallas and have that train deposit me in downtown Austin an hour later.

But there was a headline that did make me feel a little better, the lead headline in Metro that said "New fee rankles strip club patrons." C'mon. These clowns think nothing of stuffing way too many dollar bills in these dancer's skimpy outfits and waste (at least to me) massive amounts of money on lap dances, yet they are upset over a $5-a-person admittance tax? Give me a break. This is not the prude in me talking. I am as much an admirer of the female form as anyone, but I'm thinking there are all kinds of ways anyone who pays this $5 fee can find a way to compensate for that expenditure once inside the establishment. That is, if they truly are upset about it.