Columnists are complaining more and more – and they’re right – about the ever more putrid level of political attack ads this Presidential election season.
There have been other public expressions of despair about the ever-degenerating level of political discourse in books, e.g., Ann Coulter, Al Franken and others.
I wish more of these “professional” writers would use personal weblogs to express their points of view. That’s one of the reasons blogs exist, to give everyone a bully pulpit for their own ideology and opinions.
That’s different from expecting editors and readers/viewers to be pummelled in the public media with petty personal vendettas.
In fact, these political attack ads seem to be a subgroup of the genre of personal journalistic “reporting”, the kind that used to be delegated to the “women’s” pages and now end up on the front page. You know the variety, rambling columns about the benefits of breast feeding, tiresome childbirth stories and “kvetching” about how tough it is to be a soccer mom.
It seems to me that for the past couple of Presidential elections, public discourse has been “feminized” to resemble the kind of catty, inappropriately competitive conversations that, unfortunately, happen all too often among us women.
It’s disgusting enough when women indulge in this, but incomprehensible for men to do the same.
And when it involves something as important as the U.S. Presidency, not only is it unseemly, it’s dangerous.
That’s my opinion, and I’m depositing it here, where it belongs, and not on the editorial page of the Cape Cod Times.