My letter to the News & Observer? Still unpublished. After a week I should abandon all hope, I think. Perhaps the Raleigh metropolitan area is as yet unready for my cogent insights.
Their loss.
For my regular readers here, though, here’s my letter to the News & Observer about a recent Boondocks comic strip:
To the Editor:
Wednesday’s News & Observer published two letters concerning last Friday’s Boondocks comic strip. Bob Petrolino’s letter referred to the strip as “obscene garbage,” and Sharon Ferguson called Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder “a tasteless and heartless jerk.” Why did the strip deserve such condemnation? In that strip McGruder commented on the news coverage of the disappearance of Natalee Holloway by comparing the reporting on events in Aruba to reality television programming. McGruder’s strip was insensitive neither to Ms. Holloway’s disappearance nor her family’s suffering; rather, he made a point about the media’s coverage of her disappearance and the subsequent investigation which trivialized Ms. Holloway’s tragic disappearance to the level of reality television. The characters in Friday’s Boondocks note that the lines between television news and reality programming have blurred on occasion to the point where people cannot tell the difference between the two. Clearly McGruder’s point was too subtle to be recognized for its value as social commentary.
Thank you.
And I was so proud of that letter, too. 🙂