Rot Never Sleeps

Newspapers all over the country are in trouble. In our slavish desire for speed, we consume news via social media. Not because it's more in-depth or more accurate, but because it's faster.

It's also unvetted. Unconsidered. Full of errors. And reliant on questionable sources. But yes, it is faster.

Playing the dragging-my-heels Luddite while the rest of the world rockets off into supersonic cyberspace is an act fraught with futility. I am not going to change a thing. The world is going to do what the world is going to do.

Sigh.

Along with internal combustion engines, record stores, grilling with charcoal, movie theaters and book stores, newspapers face a questionable future. Those that haven't already merged or consolidated are being devoured by what I like to refer to as vulture capitalists.

Like the Chicago Tribune, currently being ingested by Alden Global Capital.

Armed with vast reserves of cash, funds like Alden swoop in, buy a controlling interest and proceed to dismantle its target like car thieves in a chop shop. They sell off the components with the expectation the ala carte sale will generate more revenue than a bundled one.

It its wake are the employees—usually left unemployed with little in the way of severance or pensions. 

I'm no businessman, but I believe had the Tribune not gone public and consequently made itself vulnerable to this parasite, it would have survived. It was a formidable newspaper with a devoted readership.

Not so long ago, it would take me a morning and a good part of the afternoon to plow through the Sunday edition. It was stuffed with local and international news of every stripe, reported by a robust network of bureaus and correspondents stationed all over the world.

Music, art, film, books, sports, politics, transportation, business and any kind of conceivable feature all received similar attention. It was the world at your fingertips, strained through a now-irrelevant filter of fact-checking and confirmation.

An old saw of journalism went “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” You know—like it was going to be on Fox News or social media or something. Newspapers like the Tribune were a gathering place, a shared link between people. They provided a sense of community.

In their place is a hopelessly fragmented media landscape playing to impossibly divergent interests. We have retreated into hyper-demographic social media bubbles which insist anyone who doesn't fit the profile is not to be trusted.

To many of you I'm just a tiresome old man bemoaning the loss of another cultural touchstone. But I'm thinking it's highly probable I'm correct about the coarse and merciless future we're building, and what role this event plays in it. 

So. John Kass, Dahleen Glanton, Heidi Stevens, Mary Schmich and Eric Zorn are gone. Alden Global Capital has paid them to go away. On the surface? A dent in a local newspaper's appeal. But taking the longer view, it is another step forward in our inevitable construction of the Tower of Babel.

It is so very, very sad. But at least Alden Global Capital will get rich(er). 

And isn't that we're all about?

Eric Zorn

There's no evidence Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn ever worked for the Illinois Department of Weights and Measures, which is a bit ironic because Zorn's writing is both weighty and measured. 

His is the clear-eyed voice of reason in a time where the beating of the partisan drum is what typically passes for fact-based thought.

I finish his pieces feeling they should be mandatory reading for Democrat and Republican alike.

He has powerfully advocated for ranked choice voting, answered the critics who oppose the repeal of Illinois' ludicrous flat tax and landed a solid body blow to Trump's somnambulant response to the Coronavirus and the misanthropes who refuse to don a face mask amidst a pandemic.

Unlike the blog you're reading now, Zorn refrains from name-calling and profanity, perhaps enjoying the advantage of writing for a newspaper expected to observe a certain level of decorum.

Whether he's writing from rage or anger or merely possesses a different point of view, he calmly and purposefully builds his argument and arrives at conclusions that don't routinely skew to one side of the aisle or the other.

But they always make sense. They always add up. And sometimes, they even provoke the admission that yes, my party/candidate/agenda doesn't always provide the best answer.

Sadly, paper media is an endangered species. The Tribune itself is now owned by Alden Global Capital, a concern Vanity Fair lovingly described as “The hedge fund vampire that bleeds newspapers dry.”

Ask yourself: what's a newspaper compared to some Wall Street fuck becoming wealthier?

Point being, read Eric Zorn and “Change of Subject” while you can. As we should all understand so very, very well by now, nothing is promised.

The Black Heart of Republicanism

I loathe Donald Trump. Despite being seventy-two years-old, he is best described as our middle-schooler in charge.

Trump's towering immaturity reveals itself in the issuing of puerile nicknames to the delight of his equally-puerile supporters. Or claiming he was misquoted by the fake news media as he walks back another incendiary statement. Or denies saying it altogether.

Emotionally and intellectually, Donald Trump is a little boy.

So it goes when you're born into wealth and know nothing but privilege. So it goes when you get a pass from the expectations and demands of adulthood. So it goes when those around you consider that wealth an adequate substitute for maturity.

Not surprisingly, the qualities that inform his White House have trickled down to the rank and file, like the fifth-grader who sees a classmate pick his nose and wipe the result on the shirt in front of him and is helpless to try it himself.

But as the estimable Eric Zorn pointed out in Friday's Chicago Tribune, there are Republican office-holders who act remarkably grown-up. Who comprehend the scope and purpose of their position and seek to fulfill it. 

Holding up Illinois' own petulant billionaire (governor Bruce Rauner) in a highly-effective compare and contrast piece, Zorn illustrates the divergent paths he and another Republican governor, Massachusetts' Charlie Baker, took after their respective elections.

To quote Zorn “Rauner chose to go down...a confrontational path. His strategy was to browbeat and insult “corrupt” Democratic legislative leaders into passing items on his highly ideological 44-point pro-business agenda, and, when that failed, to wait until they blinked during a 736-day budget stalemate.”

Baker chose consensus-building. Give and take. Choosing his battles, instead of reflexively fighting all of them. A recent endorsement in the Lowell, MA. Sun said of Baker “Differences of opinion crop up all the time. (But) there is an attitude of respect and collegiality among lawmakers that says adults are at work and we'll get this done.”

You know, just like in Washington DC.

While Rauner's re-election campaign is on the verge of becoming a blood bath (he trails Democratic challenger J.D. Prtizker by sixteen points), Baker enjoys an astounding forty-point advantage over his Democratic challenger.

So everything's great, right? Bipartisan leadership is leading the way and setting an example. Effective and necessary legislation is getting passed. Aisles are being crossed. Partisan gridlock is a memory.

What could go wrong?

In a word—Republicans.

While only ten percent of Democrats hold a negative opinion of Baker, twenty-percent of Republicans do. Right-wing nut jobs (er, organizations) are upset with Baker because he has criticized Donald Trump—and worse. Like supporting the Affordable Care Act and stronger gun control legislation.

And what kind of asshole does that?

A Republican-In-Name-Only. That's who.

So despite the fact that the Republican Baker is successfully leading a historically Democratic state and has consolidated bipartisan support behind him (shining a very positive light on Republicans in the process), party taste-makers consider him a failure. They are furious, to the point where they're urging voters to um, intercourse him on Tuesday.

Yeah.

This is the odorous black heart of Republicanism. The one that doesn't play well with others. The one that doesn't want to cooperate. The one whose core belief seems to be it's my way or the highway. Like their string-pullers at the NRA, Republicans will brook no compromise. Tolerate no free thought. The party line is all.

Or else.

Never mind that Rauner's force-fed electorate is resoundingly rejecting him, or that Baker's newly-unified one is embracing him. It's a mirage. A glitch. Kindly move on.

Three-hundred thirty-two years ago, Sir Isaac Newton formulated his Third Law of Motion, which posited that for every motion there was an equal and opposite one.

Two-thousand years before that, Greek storyteller Aesop told of a struggle between the sun and the wind. Each wanted to prove it was the greater force.

To settle their dispute, they selected a man walking along a road in a coat. Whomever could remove the man's coat would be judged the more-powerful entity.

The wind went first. It summoned its fury and tore at the man and his coat. It howled and it railed and it tried to pry the coat from the man with everything it could muster.

But the harder it tried, the tighter the man drew his coat around him.

Exhausted, the wind stopped and allowed the sun its turn.

The sun gently warmed the air, eventually coaxing the man to remove his coat.

Thus it was proven the sun was the stronger force.

Translated, this means we need grown-ups in Washington DC—not middle-school bullies who feel Lord of the Flies is a how-to manual of governance.

If you give the tiniest fuck about democracy, vote Democratic November 6.

The 140 Carat Diamond

I'm not a fan of Twitter. Never have been.

Pandering to America's collective ADHD mentality seems just a step or two removed from Wall Street traders dabbling in prescription drugs. As destructive to our brittle literacy as mobile texting devices are to vehicular safety.

A one-hundred and forty character limit? Really?

Why not demand that oil paintings be done on 5” x 5” canvases? Or that symphonies be no more than two minutes long? How about limiting writers to just one-third of their native tongue's vocabulary?

Ceilings on expression never appealed to me. Especially when they concern the written word. It's censorship made seductive because it carries the new car smell of freshly-hatched technology.

So it was with some surprise that I found myself fist-pumping the air after reading a tweet shared by Eric Zorn, he of the Chicago Tribune and the highly worthwhile Change of Subject column. Zorn uncovered a gentleman by the name of Andrew Bradley, who tweets as Betty Bowers.

With a concision and articulation that rivals great poetry, Bradley crystallized the Republican dichotomy found in their confusing and contradictory stands on religion, abortion and gay marriage with the following:

“Religious freedom means no American can be forced to deliver a wedding cake—just a rapist's baby.”

Okay. So maybe I was wrong. Some folks can say a lot with a few words. 

But not me. I need a picture. Or a thousand words.

Thomas Jefferson - Reloaded

Thomas Jefferson's 'tree of liberty' remark was long-ago co-opted by conservatives as justification for stuffing every conceivable nook and cranny of our nation with as many guns as humanly possible.

(I mean, you just never know, do you?)

But Eric Zorn, in a typically-thoughtful column in last Friday's Chicago Tribune, responded to this misappropriation by putting a new wrinkle in Jefferson's quote to better-reflect the sad ideal prized by firearm advocates in even-sadder twenty-first century America.

Instead of finishing with “...the blood of patriots and tyrants”, Zorn put it thusly:

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of innocent school children.

Which just about says it all, doesn't it?

Good going, Mr. Zorn.