It’s been more than a year since my last Your Two Cents entry, in which a reader bashed me for saying I’m not an Eagles fan. Good times. But then not one, not two, but three readers on the Bulletin’s Facebook page criticized aspects of my column on the mayor of Fontana, Acquanetta Warren, meeting President Trump. Ohh, controversy (of a very mild sort, but still).
First, this part toward the end — “Warren, who’s African-American, is a Republican. She declined to say whether she’d voted for Trump, but she lamented how polarized the political environment has become” — got an objection from April Sims: “So why did this writer feel the need to mention the mayor’s race? Her political party? Maybe.”
Yes, actually. She’s a black woman mayor, interesting in itself, and a black woman Republican mayor, even more unusual. I imagine a lot of Republicans read that and thought with pride, “Neat.”
Then Andrew Land and Jason Gaudy both objected to another part. After the mayor grabbed a pad of paper from in front of the president, and he noticed and chuckled, I followed up with: “He may have been relieved someone else was doing the grabbing for a change.”
“Have a little class, David. Try not to live down to the standards of your newspaper,” Land wrote in part. Gaudy chimed in: “allen has no class as usual. disgusting comment and it has nothing to do with which party he’s from. if this guy didn’t work for the daily bulletin no one would read anything he wrote.”
I knew that line, tossed in as an afterthought, might rub a few people the wrong way, but I went ahead anyway. It was my lone joke at Trump’s expense, and it seemed to me one was OK. For some readers, even one was too many.
I’m a little surprised someone thinks I displayed “no class as usual” — is this a thing about me no one else is willing to say? — but I do have to agree that if I didn’t write for the Daily Bulletin that no one would read me. Because, well, if I weren’t published, where WOULD anyone read me?
Was anyone else bothered by my mention of the mayor’s race and political party, or by my “grabbing” joke? Or, now that it’s out there, by my lack of class?