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It's that time of year again... the time when we pre-empt our usual Friday Talking Points column here and instead gather 'round the virtual campfire and shove a metaphorical flashlight under our chin, and proceed to tell two tales of horror guaranteed to make your blood run like ice water in the veins, no matter which side of the political divide you hail from.
When ex-actor Ronald Reagan won the presidency for the first time, I became convinced that American politics had become indistinguishable from show business. Nothing that has happened in the intervening years has caused me to change my mind on the subject. But the phenomenon of television personalities throwing their own pseudo-political "rallies" on the National Mall in Washington certainly breaks new ground in both the political arena and the entertainment world, I have to admit.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio, of Arizona, recently made the news. In his own words: "I just got done welcoming Sarah Palin to our County [sic]. Had a nice chat and gave her a pair of pink underwear." This marks a turning point in the American political scene, where pink underwear has been rehabilitated, so to speak, within the Republican Party.
But all of that is neither here nor there. The style of journalism known as "three-dot" was pioneered and perfected by the late great Herb Caen of San Francisco newspaper fame, and consists of stringing together many disparate items conjoined with a liberal usage of ellipses, or those three little dots which indicate "sentence trails off here" or, in journalism, sometimes "there's a bunch of stuff I cut out from this excerpt here." Three-dot journalism relies on the first, and more common, usage... to trail off... into vagueness... or even innuendo....
Frank Zappa was recently honored by the city of Baltimore (where he spent the first years of his life) by the erection of a bust in front of a public library. And, yes, I like to think Frank is up there somewhere smiling down on my usage of the words "erection" and "bust" in that sentence. More on that in a bit.
First, though, we simply must wish ourselves a happy third anniversary. Woo hoo! Three years of FTP columns!
OK, that was an annoying headline, I fully admit. It was annoying to type out, and I can only imagine how annoying it must be to read.
We're going to take a cartoon break today, because I have not just one but actually two cartoons waiting in the wings from C.W. Cunningham. I'm going to post them separately here, because the second one needs its own title. The first shows a different perspective of an earlier cartoon.
Enjoy!
-- Chris Weigant
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