* Not that we need to be reminded, but today’s hyper-partisan, technologically customized, self-serve media is too often beyond the pale in its criticism of President Barack Obama–from “socialist” rants to racial insults. We are, quite arguably, devolving in civility when it comes to public discourse.
For context, however, here are some representative passages from major 19th century newspapers weighing in on the presidential nomination of Abraham Lincoln:
“A fourth rate lecturer who cannot speak good grammar … Lincoln is the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs, arms and hatchet-face ever strung upon a single frame. He has most unwarrantly abused the privilege which all politicians have of being ugly.”–New York Herald. “After him what decent white man would be president?”–Charleston Mercury. “An illiterate partizan possessed only of his inveterate hatred of slavery and his openly avowed predilections for negro equality.”–Richmond Enquirer.
* We know that those two killers who escaped from a New York prison used power tools to break through bricks and steel walls and pipes, crawled up catwalks and sliced through a manhole-cover lock outside the prison. We also know they disguised their bunks with guard-fooling stuffed clothes and left a prison-taunting caricature with the words “Have a nice day.”
Authorities, to be sure, want to know how they got the power tools, how they cut their way out without being heard and a lot more. We shouldn’t have to wait for the HBO movie to find out.
* Among the media we encountered outside Amalie Arena last Saturday were two TV reporters from Finland who seemed enamored of a river dyeing. I asked them what it was like to be from a Scandanavian hockey hotbed and cover a Stanley Cup in a place like Tampa, Florida.
“Well you’ve got a couple of players (the Lightning’s Valtteri Filppula and the Blackhawks’ Teuvo Teravainen) from Finland,” said one. “And we were in Los Angeles last year, so we’re used to something different. We like it a lot. This is cool.”