Chinks in the Armour

Randomly passing through a small town in Virginia about 20 minutes outside of Washington, DC, I started flipping through a local paper while waiting for a coffee at the Starbucks.

Causally flipping through, noticing outrageous house prices and reading about municipal issues, one article caught my eye: a scathing commentary on President Bush .Now when I say scathing, I mean really scathing – like to a degree that I’m not use to even in minority parliament Ottawa.

Now, granted I’m not far from Democrat D.C., but I didn’t imagine in that peaceful Virginia town that there would be such an open blasting of the President. This article is something that I’d expect to see more in the Montreal Mirror or the Ottawa Express. The fact that a local rag is the vehicle of this commentary is also interesting. Could this be a sign of changing times? Something slowly boiling up below the surface? A revolutionary movement of anger and frustration and despair slowly sweeping through small towns ending in a final roar at the 2008 Presidentials?

Now I could be barking up the wrong tree and totally over analyzing one random column. But it did make for interesting Saturday afternoon reading and the chance for some sort of politico-anthropological analysis of a small Virginia town.