We have finally suffered through the first of the presidential caucuses as witnessed through the fuzzy filtering gaze of the media. It is good these pundits and critics of the system give themselves something to do, but they surely get in each other’s way when they take their carnival acts out on the road. When they run out of topics of substance to view under their microscopes, they start in on how the candidates dress, comb their hair, treat their spouses, etc. A point in history draws quite a contrast between these times: few people in the country even knew that FDR was wheelchair bound during his presidency. Reporters did not intrude or trespass on the man’s right to keep this one part of his life private. Maybe there was some implicit threat to any media source who “spilled these beans,” but surely some muckraker would have delighted in purveying this information. It was a different time. No one concerned himself with such information.
I will be absent from this keyboard for a time since we will soon travel to Florida (where the temps have dipped below freezing and stiff iguanas fell out of trees). Last year we froze in Texas while the weather remained quite mild here in good ole North Dakota. I have never been in the southeastern part of the U.S. and look forward to seeing new territory. I'll be back in about three weeks.
