Graceless

WARNING: Prolonged vent ahead! I try not to openly vent too often because I tend to be a tad juvenile about it, but this got me riled up last weekend and I couldn't help myself. What's a blog for if not for venting sometimes, right?! Anyway . . .

Some say that it’s best to expect the unexpected, but I’ve found that to be rather tiring endeavour; I prefer instead to just not assume too much. Even still, it’s refreshing to know that the Earth is a big enough place that no matter how unassuming I am there will still be contexts which leave me confused and disoriented. This weekend while I was relaxing in downtown Santa Cruz at a small café, on their sleek flat screen TV in between the woman with shorn hair openly breast feeding her young child, the French kids, the petite Asian student and the glazed thoroughly inked beach denizen was something that did not belong: Nancy Grace. I was nettled.

Nancy Grace, the brackish talk show host who eked out a living as a state prosecutor before becoming one of the most inane talking heads on a TV today, was staring out at me smugly in a Santa Cruz coffee shop. I can only assume that something more worthwhile had been on before her and that the channel just hasn’t gotten changed, but there she was none the less. She opined for several minutes about the recent tragedy in South Carolina involving the death of two small children found under a kitchen sink, and for the most part I couldn’t hear what she was saying so I was left unperturbed, except for occasionally catching her sneering visage from the corner of my eye. She eventually, however, stumbled her way on to the Michael Vick saga; while I still couldn’t clearly hear what vitriolic and uninformed diatribe she had embarked on, the footage for the spot was her and an assortment of talking heads in small boxes in the corner of the screen while they rolled stock footage of put bulls fighting in rings.

So let me get this strait . . . we’re indicting Michael Vick for fighting dogs, and in the process ejaculating every condemnation imaginable about the depravity and inhumanity of the practice. About how anyone who would stoop to even watching let alone organizing dog fights deserves time in Federal prison. About how the concept is so vile it should hardly be mentioned. In the meantime, though, while we talk about it ad nauseum, you might as well take in some footage of dogs ripping each other up. Perfect. Makes perfect sense. Thank you, CNN, for providing us with that well crafted piece of journalistic integrity.

I don’t know to what extent Vick was involved in the dog fighting ring being run out of his house in Virginia, but I do find dog fighting one of the more reprehensible practices around. Close behind, however, is watching Nancy Grace or any of the other difficult-to-respect-or-take-seriously reactionary thick-hearted and stiff-necked hacks running amok in the news media. Mercifully the channel was changed shortly after the Michael Vick spot began.