Blog #16

My ultimate image of a cowboy consists of three things: a western ranch, a herd of cattle and a hat. Sure, there are more things than that, but these three images are integral in my imagination's ability to percieve cowboys. How can you be a cowboy if you aren't on a ranch? How can you succeed on a ranch without a massive herd of cattle? And, most importantly, how can you succceed as a cowboy without the perfect cowboy hat to put on your head? These things are necessary.

However, in her essay, "About Men," Elrich destroys all of our traditional ideas of cowboys by portraying the cowboy's soft, tender side, the side that needs a woman's help to get along, the side that no one expected was there. Who could have imagined that cowboys do more than lead cattle from one place to the next? Who could have imagined that cowboys really care for their animals and are really soft-hearted on the inside?

I never knew.

Blog #17

Mitch Albom raised a great question when he presented the O.J. Simpson trial as the most important American event of the past two decades- what was the most important American event of the past two decades? It's hard to imagine the O.J. Simpson trial as the most important American event of the last two decades when you juxtapose it with the fall of the Soviet Union and the break up of the Warsaw Pact, or the Persian Gulf War or the many Presidential elections of the past two decades. However impossible it may seem, I agree with Albom's assertion that the O.J. Simpson trial affected American society the most. The fall of the Soviet Union or the the Persian Gulf War may have been huge news when they occurred, but their lasting affects pale in comparision to the O.J. Simpson trial. I have tried watching traditional news sources such as CNN, Fox, or MSN before, but now I cannot. These stations brodcast such copious amounts of crap that I can no longer trust them. This is a direct result of the O.J. Trial's drastic affects on the media. How can anything else compare?