One of my favorite humor tropes when writing an opinion column is the Facebook father-in-law.
You can picture him, right? Balding, paunchy, 50- to 60-something, long-suffering wife, exasperated adult children: the network television crime procedural demographic. I adopted him as a barely coded racist/sexist stock character who could slip past the censors at nervous media outlets. The Facebook father-in-law is the person who wrote letters to the editor about Cam Newton's hats and claimed to stop watching the NFL four years ago because of the protests (yet always knows who won on Sunday). He's the guy who ruins Thanksgiving.