Off The Cuff

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

— Although last week was National Newspaper Week and we wrote our comments about that subject two weeks ago while on vacation, the above cartoon caught my attention.

What made that so is that the cartoon printed abovewas for National Newspaper Week and it appeared in The Gravette News Herald 50 years ago tomorrow - October 15, 1959.

An old truism really holds true, doesn’t it? Some things never change: fraud, graft, corruption in government. How sad. How tragic.

How self-fulfilling.

And how fast we are evolving. First we were a republic. According to the constitution we still are. But conveniently, and who says why, we evolvedinto a democracy. Then, sometime during the last century, we evolved into a socio-democracy as the federal government (and less often the states and local entities) began assuming more control over those individual freedoms our founders fought so hard to guarantee.

Aided and abetted by public malaise and the above mentioned cartoon suggestions, we are fast evolving into a society that might simply be called a . . . . . . .that dreaded word we won’t repeat.

We continue to rush pell mell into that other phase in which, like the Thanksgiving turkey which gorges on giveaways, we continue to fatten ourselves for the slaughter.

News, Pages 4 on 10/14/2009