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note: I just cranked out this in an hour and only did minimal editing. I corrected the dozen mistakes my spell check pointed out. This is a morning reverie that let me get a lot off my chest.
A two newspaper a day man
I woke late from a florid dream and as of 10:40 I haven’t yet cracked the NYT or WAPO. My BH (better half) said she had read the Times piece on President Trump being interviewed in the Oval Office by Times reporters about the woman his police forces shot to death in Minneapolis yesterday when she attempted to drive slowly around them. I was told to read it but I was reading a story so engrossing on another of the President’s battle fields that I thought it too was a Times piece. When I emailed it to myself, I discovered it was on the Minnesota Public Radio MPR news feed. It was about the cowboy head of the Border Patrol which is also in Minneapolis ridding the nation of home builders and agriculture’s slave laborers. BTW here’s an old column of mine –https://www.snowbizz.com/Diogenes/NotEudora04/corncob.htm– that touches on my first meeting with them.
The story I was reading and did send to myself was about the man who has climbed the ranks of the Border Control and swaggers around America as if he was the silicone imbedded Christy Gnome protecting America from all the people we pay on the cheap to avoid their unpleasant jobs.
It was an eye opening piece of story telling about a man who’s second generation Dad who got drunk on as he told a North Carolina reporter in prison, on two or three six-pacts (he couldn’t remember how many) because his wife had warned him against drinking and proceeded to get into his car and turn into the wrong lane of a highway and plow into an oncoming car killing it driver a young woman. And today his son, a third generation Italian whose peasant immigrant grandparents fled Italy and by chain migration evaded the hard ass anti-immigrant laws meant to keep brown skinned Mediterranean people out of America so they wouldn’t pollute America’s bloodline is out himself blaming Central Americans for their DUI’s that kill innocent Americans.
And my wife’s story. I asked her about it a few minutes ago and it was about Trump giving the Times reporters the video the Gnome was using to prove the young woman was a nasty piece of work aiming to run down Trump’s police. Of course, of course, the Times reporters looked at it and discovered what my wife did yesterday and most of America not relying on Fox News or Trump’s corner of the news. It looked like a distressed woman slowly pulling her car away to go around the man whose gun shot her four times as she edged past him.
I’ll start reading my go-to newspapers after I get to the title of this piece.
My Dad was a two newspaper a day man, when he wasn’t a three paper reader! He also subscribed to the Christian Science Monitor for years.
He also subscribed to the “liberal” centrist news magazine Newsweek and the pro-business Business Week (my dad taught business law in a college Business Department) and the conservative centrist magazine US News and World Report.
And my dad subscribed to other magazines, National Geographic for me, Psychology Today for himself and read a great many history books. And he monitored the television news programs that jumped for 15 minutes of news coverage before JFK’s assassination to half an hour coverage not long afterward.
I write this mostly to explain my own news reading habits going back to my days as a high school debater. All those magazines plus my own six-year subscription to Reader’s Digest filled my impressionable head that I really had too much going on upstairs to be a very focused debater. My first debate as a sophomore I announced I was going to give 25 reasons for why our foreign aid was a disaster. I only had five minutes to speak. The nun who coached the Catholic School team we were challenging snorted so hard containing a laugh that she nearly fell out of her seat.
I was a poorly paid teacher when I moved to Duluth and I didn’t have time to read my new paper the morning Duluth News Tribune before school. I could listen to news on the radio and I was always eager to begin classes with news reports they way my Eighth grade geography teacher Mr. Just did. He put about ten news headlines in half strips of copy paper he’d run through a mimeograph machine giving all the type a blue purple cast.
(I sat in Patty Thompson’s chair following her class and the day that a headline read “Paul McCartney was married today) she had scrawled “its not true” on the news strip I would read in the following class. I heard later that Patty had stalked out of class and school without a word. Who says the news isn’t gripping?
I did mention Reader’s Digest. As I’ve written before that was the work of two teachers. Mrs. Jones who had a classroom subscription to the famously abridged stories in their Digest and my grandmother who learned of my fascination with Readers Digest. For the next six years she gave me a birthday subscription. And the first story we were assigned in my seventh-grade classroom by Mrs. Jones. It was a relatively lengthy story about the “Stanleyville Massacre.” It took place in the soon to be liberated Belgium Congo in the territorial capitol now known as Kinshasa (Where Muhamad Ali fought the Rumble in the Jungle) a few years later.
I was glued to a story that reported European residents were captured by black mobs that slit open their bellies and passed them around to take bites out of so that like eating a lion’s liver they would gain strength and courage. Hell! What seventh grader wouldn’t find that riveting reading?
There is a lot of news that is riveting and Donald Trump’s given us a lot of it. And for a lot of Americans his version is the gospel. This not surprisingly insults my long appreciation for the challenging job of seeking truth. And for some journalists in the nation’s Trump favors without democracies it is a perilous business. It’s much easier for Trump to negotiate with world leaders who don’t have to bother with democracies and legislative bodies. And for the first time in US history that we have a president who barely pays any attention to the representatives of the people in the check on executive power that our Congress was designed to be. I apologize if you have to read that long sentence twice to take it all in.
