Richard Crowson

Whew! Sorry, folks, I almost didn’t make it here to the KMUW studio this morning to do my commentary. I was on time when I left my home but as I was going up Hillside my horse stumbled badly and I fell out of the saddle. He had a considerable limp after that so we slowed down and I just now tied him up to the hitching post out front where the KMUW parking lot used to be.

For 35 years I’ve been a political cartoonist so I know a little bit about false dichotomies. Cartoonists are in the business of depicting current events in black-and-white terms.

Barreling relentlessly onward like some refrigerator-sized linebacker, whether we’re ready for it or not, determined to sack us many yards behind the line of scrimmage, comes Christmas.

We still send out Christmas cards the old-fashioned, analog, low-tech, snail-mail way at my house. And we have an old, well-worn address book that gets hauled out each year for the chore of addressing the envelopes. Sometimes we talk about going to a computerized list of friends and relatives – one that would enable us to print out mailing labels. But I just can’t do it.

During the dust bowl, I know from watching Ken Burns’ recent engaging PBS documentary, they had Black Sunday. It was the day of a devastating dust storm that blackened the sky. 300 million tons of topsoil blew away in that single event.

We’ve been inundated for so many months with political exclamation points. How great is it now to be able to relax a bit and let nature remind us that there is more to life than Republican red and Democratic blue.

There’s a memorable Halloween night scene in the book To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. The story’s protagonist, 6-year old Scout is walking home after dark from a Halloween school program. Scout is still wearing her clumsy chicken wire and paper costume from the program in which children represent different agricultural products: she’s dressed as a cured ham.

Whenever I get commentator’s block and have difficulty coming up with a topic for these little radio moments of mine, I consult with my think tank. I have a pretty small think tank. It consists of just Hank and Lucy. And, to tell the truth, there are occasional communication difficulties due to the fact that Hank and Lucy are dogs, Airedales to be exact, and I am not.