Silly me. I actually thought last Tuesday's post was relatively innocuous.
I certainly didn't think I was plowing any new ground -- big cars, big houses, overweight Americans. It's all been said time and again by people both smarter than me and stupider than me.
I didn't even come to any big conclusions. All I said was that we might have to do something.
You would have thought I pissed on the Statue of Liberty.
I appreciated the long post that was essentially a pep talk about losing weight. I've actually lost about 500-600 pounds in my lifetime; I just keep gaining them back when I get sedentary. I made a decision this time to do something my son has been asking me to do. Virgile wants me to start training for a triathlon; he's currently building up to an ironman triathlon this summer in France.
Now I'm not going to swim 2 miles in open water, cycle 115 miles and then run 26.2 miles. I may be stupid, but I don't have a death wish.
I'm going to train for a sprint triathlon like the one he did last month -- a 5k run, a 15k ride and 150 meters in the pool.
The goal is for next March in Pasadena, when I will be 60 years old.
So losing the weight isn't a huge deal.
But I am surprised at how some people react whenever they think I'm saying something critical about this country. Sorry, but millions of people in this country are not just fat, they're obese. Millions of people spend billions of dollars on crap they don't need. Which part of that don't you get?
Yeah, I'm angry. Yeah, I despise commentators on the far right and the far left who distort issues and stir people up. If you like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, you're not my audience. I'm actually kind of bitter about how I lost my job too.
Afraid? No, I'm not really afraid of much. I'm too damned old to be afraid of anything in this world, and I'm too strong in my faith to be seriously afraid of what comes next.
So say what you want -- I love getting comments and I love it when those comments disagree with me -- but sorry, I'm not that fearful of anything more than keeping my wife healthy and making sure my kids get every advantage they can.
But thanks for asking.
Posts
3 comments:
The lady (gent) doth protest too much.
The following is from www.salon.com today regarding what you seemingly despise -- right- and left-wing radio talk shows:
" The vast majority of the talk radio audience listens in their car or from home. People driving around during the day and listening to the radio are probably demographically skewed toward the self-employed or people in some sort of sales. Admittedly, there are a large number of service jobs that require drive time, but I would bet those people are not interested in politics. The entrepreneur or six-figure sales professional is far more likely to be a conservative. People listening from home would either be stay-at-home parents or people working from home. These groups would also tend to be much more likely to listen to Laura Schlessinger than Al Franken.
2) The liberal talk shows I've listened to are not really all that entertaining. The jokes tend to be mean-spirited personal attacks and are rarely as clever as what I have heard on Rush Limbaugh's program. I think if the left wants to have a successful talk radio platform, they should be asking people like Jon Stewart for ideas and quit trying to silence the opposition.
Marty Grant
New York City
Your theories about the talk radio audience are intriguing. The most rewarding aspect of talk radio for me is the callers, whose voices are heard nowhere else in the culture -- the feisty, super-organized home-schooling moms, the gruffly stoical transcontinental truckers, and the fiercely independent and self-reliant small-business owners, outraged by Washington's tilt toward bailing out corrupt, top-heavy corporations.
However, the popularity of conservative radio shows is a round-the-clock phenomenon. There are flamboyant evening hosts as well as night replays of the major daytime shows, extending well past midnight to dawn. Clearly, conservative hosts have an instinctive rapport with AM radio, which I have been arguing for years is a populist medium (an idea that finally seems to have taken wing in its invocation by other commentators).
Salon reader Cecil W. Powell writes: "The failure of talkers on liberal radio is in large part due to an absolute inability to poke fun at themselves." How true! Liberal hosts like to snap and snip and chortle snidely, but they are weighed down by a complacent superiority complex, a paralyzing sanctimony. They mistake irony for wit. The conservative hosts love to rant and stomp and bring down the house. They're doing breakneck vaudeville while liberal hosts are primly stirring their non-caffeine green tea."
I thought it was well-done. I'm interested in reading your take. (Mind you, I will be able to see if you have a self-deprecating sense of humor)
CINDY W.
I agree with most of what you said. Talk radio is definitely divided into two types -- the listeners and the callers.
With a show like Limbaugh's, callers have to hit the redial button hundreds of times to get through, so they are definitely committed.
I don't really know how to be self-deprecating in this context, but in all the times I have listened to talk radio on both the right and the left, I have never heard any of them be self-deprecating.
Mostly they're self-righteous -- Hannity's "a great American," Limbaugh's "talent on loan from God."
I don't know why someone like Al Franken, who had made his career as a humorist, lost all sense of humor on the radio.
I'll tell you the one person I've listened to who is wonderful -- and hilarious.
Stephanie Miller.
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