Out of the Inkwell

ADVENTURES IN MEDIA, EPISODE 213:

My career in media has almost always included an interactive element. I certainly had that as a radio talk show host back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and I've had that for the past 11 years working at Reminder Publications.

Even when people are calling me names and expressing pretty hateful thoughts about me, I hold close to my happy place that this is the nature of political discourse in America and really has always been so. Newspapers in the 18th and 19th century were far more harsh than even the worse Murdoch tab today – as difficult as that may be.

My mail at WREB included a cut and paste job in which my face was photocopied on top of the "Asshole of the Month" column that used to run in "Hustler." Whoever sent it put some thought in that piece of hate mail.

It's interesting how some people are reassured by hate and seek its comfort over trying to either understand some other opinion or agree that this country was founded on varying ideas.

Today, I get a fair number of letters to the editor and over the years I've learned that some people write to react to something I've written, some people simply need to voice their opinion on an issue and some just need to write – anything

The graphic above is my all time favorite letter, written to me by John Skok who used write almost every week. I'm afraid that Mr. Skok has probably passed on by now and I enjoyed his musings.

This one, though, was simply way out of the box and, yes, I printed it.

"Has anyone noticed as I have that some bathroom tissues (toilet paper rolls) are less wide than they used to be? If the companies are going to make the paper tissue less wider than now we are in big trouble. Oh, well, back to the depression era when we used crumpled newspaper ot leaves. What a way to recycle paper."

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs