Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
When we were first married, Sue and I were selected as a Nielsen Family. It was November 1982, and we lived in a three-room rental house on Barrett Drive in Lusk.
The Nielsen Company sent us a booklet with all the TV listings available on the Lusk Cable system, plus a handful of stations we received over the air from Casper, Cheyenne, Scottsbluff, and Rapid City. They even taped a quarter to the booklet as payment for our diligence.
We discovered a pattern of binge-watching that extends to our viewing habits today. M.A.S.H. was still being produced, plus it had been in syndication since 1979. We watched new episodes each Monday night on CBS. We discovered that we watched syndicated episodes two or three times a day as well.
M.A.S.H. was all over the dial.
Later, it was Hill Street Blues, Everybody Loves Raymond, and now we’re going through all the seasons and episodes of In the Heat of the Night on YouTube.
One episode last week brought the reality of dealing with the God-awful stories that pass for news today, with a similar scenario between Chief Gillespie (played masterfully by the late Carol O’Connor) and Bubba Skinner, the captain of the Sparta, Mississippi Police.
After a trying day, the Chief is obviously worn out. As Bubba prepares to leave the chief’s home after an investigation, he leans around the front door and says, “Don’t work too hard, there’s a Duke Wayne movie on channel 9. He gets to fight the bad guys and win.”
The Chief looks at his dog and says, “Well, what should we do?”
The pup barks twice, and Chief Gillespie says, “The Duke it is.”
It’s the Duke for a lot of people these days, and Clint Eastwood, Robert Duvall, Ben Johnson, Gary Cooper, and a bevy of lesser-known western stars from the silver screen beginning in the late 1940s through the classic TV Westerns of the 1960s and the grittier modern series like Deadwood and Yellowstone.
A key demographic of American society has checked out on the nightly news. A growing majority of Baby Boomer and Generation X men are no longer tuning in to traditional news.
I’m one of them, as is my friend, and historian extraordinaire, Chico Her Many Horses.
Chico and I share the same cynical views of modern newscasts. Why bother? It’s no longer news; it’s just Trump 24/7. There is nothing else to report on aside from Trump’s latest insult, breach of trust, or more constant piling on the middle class, minorities, and women.
Much like someone vomiting, we know it’s out there. We just don’t want to look at it.
Instead, Gen X and Boomer men have turned to streaming westerns. It takes us back to a day when good was good, bad was bad, and most of the time the good guys won. Now, in reality, the “good guys” never win. The people with money in the Epstein case may never come to light, they rip us off, send boatloads of money to their rich friends, and wealthier campaign contributors, allow the ultra-wealthy to live tax-free while hammering the poor and middle class, and we’re just supposed to smile and take it.
I thought I was the only one who had checked out on national news. It appears I’m just one of the larger herd.
I miss a time when America was good and honest, the envy of the world. Now, I’m not sure that America ever existed. Our collective trust in institutions of all types, local, state, national, and international, is in tatters. It’s been systematically destroyed over the last 10 years with no relief in sight.
We all know honest, hardworking, dedicated law enforcement officers and teachers, but the political talking heads will tell you they’re all ineffective, on the take, biased, and horrible at their jobs.
It is maddening, tiring, and facetious all wrapped in a carefully orchestrated bias.
For the past 18 months, we’ve slid into one of the greatest orchestrated descents into idiocy in the history of the world.
It would be spectacular if it weren’t so damaging and depressing.
I miss the America of Dwight Eisenhower. It had its share of problems if you were female, or a minority, but change was coming rapidly and with earnest. It was a great time to be a middle-class American anywhere in the USA outside the South.
Now there is no escape; the idiocy permeates our lives 24/7 with all the subtlety of a runaway freight train.
I wish it was just the clowns we send to D.C., but crap flows downhill and Cheyenne has more than its fair share. Governor Gordon has done a masterful job in keeping the Freedom Caucus and other outlandishly extreme maniacs at bay, but his term is up.
I had coffee with a gubernatorial candidate last week. I met Jim Byrd in Crane Hall a long time ago.
Jim was from Cheyenne, where he still lives today. He’s running for the U.S. Senate, heaven forbid, as a Democrat… I’ll wait for the collective shock to wear off…
Jim had a great point, he said, “People always claim Wyoming is a red state; in reality, it’s purple.”
I think he was right.
Yes, we’re as far right as a state with an educated population can be. We can’t compete with the highly illiterate American South when it comes to right-wing rhetoric, but we do what we can.
Jim pointed out that there are far more Democrats in Wyoming than the data indicates. That’s because the Republican primary determines every election. If you’re not a member of the GOP, your vote doesn’t count for anything in the Cowboy State.
That’s why the “ultimate” insult for the far right is to call someone a “RINO” (Republican in Name Only). Ok, so what?
The federal government is a mess, a hot one at that. It will take a lot of time to undo the damage of the last 18 months, decades perhaps.
What many of the candidates for state office don’t get yet, (but they will in August) is that hitching your entire identity to one, growingly despised man isn’t the ticket to election success. It might be just the opposite. Nothing in MAGA land is free.
Why would Wyoming voters support higher fuel prices, grocery inflation off the charts, lack of health care, living paycheck to paycheck, no more acceptance of pre-existing conditions, and a concerted effort to disenfranchise women and people of color?
If the plan is successful, it says terrible things about Wyoming people.
One tidbit that escaped most of the nationally embattled “news” platforms is the national debt surpassing the Gross Domestic Product for the first time in American history.
That means we now owe more, largely to foreign investors, than we produce in a year. The deficit spending is the highest ever recorded. Buy it, no matter the cost, and put the bill on future generations.
An American making $50,000 a year pays $36 to school lunch programs and welfare. They pay $4000 in corporate subsidies. Rugged individualism for the average American, unlimited handouts to corporations, and federal campaign donors.
The largest portion of the federal budget isn’t the military though it’s more than the next 10 countries combined, it’s paying interest on the national debt.
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon looks like a good choice instead of the news. How about Shane, or Dances with Wolves, maybe High Plains Drifter, or High Noon?
Yes, it’s escapism, but who wants the constant horror of the daily news?