Road Trip!
Post-Trip Review: Issue-Oriented
Alakazam!
Note: This is the seventh in a series of posts describing my effort to get letters published in newspapers in every state and territory of the U.S.A. You can read the whole series here.
In abandoning the Niceness Bombs and devoting myself instead to issue-oriented letters, I naturally chose the most pressing issue of early 2021: What to call the members of the Potato Head family.
You Say Potato, I Say Mister Potato
I already had a Niceness Bomb in the Minot newspaper, and I already had a Smokey and the Bandit letter in the Rome, GA newspaper, so what gives with sending them a Potato Head letter? What gave was that this letter was so long that with my hard-earned respect for editorial guidelines, I knew of very few newspapers that would even consider publishing it. Minot and Rome were among the few with such generous word limits, plus I had already had success there. So while these publications did not add to my count of states with publications, they did provide a home for what I thought was a good bit of writing, and they did enhance my overall statistics. That’s right—while keeping my eye on the new prize (nationwide publication), I still craved sweet, black ink for its own sake.
Based on no research whatsoever, I believe my letter may be the only entry in the Potato Head nomenclature debate to mention not just gender but actual potato genitalia, and to invoke the spirit of Andy Warhol in late mid-century child’s play.
As it appeared in the Minot Daily News.
As it appeared in the Rome News-Tribune.
James California Condor, Esquire
James California Condor, Esquire, is the much larger, more dastardly descendant of Jim Crow. Yes, to properly characterize the travesty of rules for the orderly conduct of elections, a bigger name and a bigger bird are called for. “Jim Eagle” was already taken by the disingenuous commentators. In fact, my own bird (the condor) actually refers to the U.S. tax code, which is chock full of actual restrictions, vastly outdoing any election law you can name.
I have written elsewhere about the need to honor newspaper guidelines and the need to provide well-written, print-ready copy to improve your chances with editors. I have not discussed editorial slant, because until now I was not dealing with ideological issues. This letter was my first to address a purely political issue. I submitted it to at least twenty newspapers, and it was published in ten of them. It might have been rejected by ten newspapers for any number of reasons, but the fact is that of the ten papers that ran it, nine of them demonstrate a conservative editorial slant. All of the papers with a purely leftist slant rejected it.
The New Hampshire newspaper that published it has a leftist slant, but New England in general is an interesting case. The political systems of New England attract massive participation by citizens, either as officeholders or as frequent attendees and speakers at all manner of political gatherings. The editorial pages in that region, more so than any other I observed, contain letters from all sides of every issue. They are also by far the most combative letters, with many of them calling out other letter-writers by name and delivering withering insults.
Today, long after my road trip ended, I returned to one New England newspaper to see if my 2021 impression of verbal combat was a temporary thing, and I find that they must still have their cudgels and knives out. As evidence, here are the headers from two recent pleas for civility.
This first one is rather generic, and it is possible that the attackers to whom he refers may not know that he is addressing them:
But then there’s a more specific request which, Oh My God:
Sure it’s repugnant, but is it wrong? Is she, in fact, a Thanksgiving Nazi?
While New England editors may be as liberal as the majority of editors in other regions, I give them kudos for publishing a great diversity of opinion, and I think everyone involved must actually enjoy the nasty personal attacks—else why would I be able to find evidence of such attacks every single time I look at one of those New England papers? I do find it interesting that editors who insist on local addresses for their letter writers will also publish a letter calling someone’s mom a Thanksgiving Nazi.
As it appeared in the Minot Daily News.
As it appeared in the Lawton Constitution.
As it appeared in the Fort Bend Herald.
As it appeared in the Standard-Examiner.
As it appeared in the Gainesville Daily Register.
As it appeared in the Denton Record-Chronicle.
As it appeared in the Casper Star-Tribune.
As it appeared in the Winston-Salem Journal.
As it appeared in the Concord Monitor.
As it appeared in the Cleveland Daily Banner.
Wind Farm Aesthetics
While reading local newspapers to find likely placed to plant my Niceness Bombs, I noticed that debates over wind farms were quite common across this great land. This led me to write a Mad Libs letter that I could adapt to any community just by plugging in the name of the wind farm development under discussion. Two easy scores, though one of them was in Washington state, where I had already had a Vaccination Niceness Bomb published, so it only increased my number of publications, not my number of states. Publication is, though, as the song says, the way (uh-huh uh-huh) I like it.
As it appeared in the Wichita Eagle. Only two (2) occurrences of the word “dispositive” made it into print. Editors. What can you do?
As it appeared in the Tri-City Herald. All three (3) occurrences of the word “dispositive.” Yes!
#NeighMeansNeigh
I was so captivated with the idea of applying #MeToo and the then-popular obsession over The Handmaid’s Tale to horse breeding that I overstepped. I wrote this and fired it off and it was published almost immediately. I then realized that I had crossed the line into issue advocacy in a community where I did not live. I could have made the same points without referring to the use of taxpayer money. Throughout my road trip, I tried to keep it light and not write anything that might actually influence anyone. I think most editors published my letters because they recognized them as attempts at humor; however, some editors and many readers were not in on the jokes. I got the ink, but I consider this a misfire.
As it appeared in the Conway Daily Sun.
Don’t Cross the Handball Men
I only wish I had added “…with calloused hands” to the end of the fragmentary sentence, “Tough men.”
As it appeared in the Paducah Sun.
Chicken and Waffles Kerfuffle
This marks the other major appearance of chicken and waffles in my letters, following their appearance in at least one Niceness Bomb. This time, though, I was responding to someone else who had brought them up. I still have never tried this dish, but I feel like something of an authority on it now.
As it appeared in the Yuma Sun.
In your face, Mimi.
An Easy Way to End the Filibuster
The point is often made that the party that changes the rules to eliminate the filibuster will regret it the next time they are in the minority. Here I take that idea a step farther: why not demonstrate your sincerity by giving the other side the first shot at filibuster-free power?
As it appeared in the Northwest Indiana Times.
As it appeared in the Minot Daily News.
Yay Capitalism (Sis Boom Bah)
I can imagine exactly how a committed anti-capitalist would respond to this letter. In it, I mention fractional ownership of shares of stock. Here’s one way to do that for as little as $5. If you can’t possibly scrape up five dollars for this then you have my genuine sympathy. If you do have $5 to spare for this but you think it’s a terrible idea to own something that could produce value for you, please drop me a line and tell me why you think that. I don’t want to argue—I just want to understand.
Boing!