The following is a Letter to the Editor that I sent to the San Antonio Express-News this morning...
The foul stench emitting from the Express-News comics page was even more odorous and offensive this past week as the “Mallard Fillmore” strip launched a vicious and nasty week-long attack on public school teachers to mark the beginning of the new school year.
Why the Express-News editors tolerate this nastiness is a mystery to me. Whenever the Doonesbury strip has anything even remotely controversial they are quick to yank it and run replacement strips. But I suppose a mean-spirited “comic” strip that mocks public school teachers as being stupid and lazy is perfectly fine with them.
The public school system is a favorite target of Bruce Tinsley, the far-rightwing author of the humor-free Mallard strip. Whenever he tires of drawing grotesque caricatures of politicians he does not like — with their eyes crossed and their noses and chins stretching off the page — Tinsley typically turns his wrath on postal workers, school teachers, labor unions, immigrants or any other group of people to serve as the scapegoats of his twisted ideology.
Real conservatives should be just as offended by Tinsley’s hateful diatribes as the people who get slapped in the face everytime they open their newspaper. They should demand that the Express-News follow the lead of its sister paper in Houston and dump the foul fowl and replace it with a conservative strip that does not bring shame and dishonor on their side of the political spectrum. Prickly City, which already runs in the E-N, is one example and there are many others.
I am not a teacher, nor am I employed by the school system or any part of the public sector. But I send my kids to public school and I respect the good work that their teachers do to give them an excellent education. It is too bad that our teachers have to be denigrated everyday in their daily newspaper’s so-called funny pages.
No comments:
Post a Comment