End of an Era

I just cancelled my subscription to a daily newspaper after sixty-eight years of subscribing in Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Paul, Philadelphia and to the Boston Globe. No, I am not losing my eyesight, nor am I running out of money or moving to Paris, where like a proper Parisian, I will read Le Monde. It's simply that I am fed up with what the papers write about and the predictability. Actually it is not their fault. They are only the messengers for the newsmakers. The chief culprit is Congress. The Senate and House have lots of meetings, but little of genuine significance to the nation ever happens. The journals have to put out an edition every day. How can they do it if there is no news? By re-cycling the same story over and over and over with slight modifications to stress presumably, but often softball NEWS – REPUBLICANS BLAST OBAMA ON BUDGET, or DEMOCRATS FAULT GOP ON CLIMATE CHANGE.CHANGE. The story could be about Social Security or Medicare or drug lords and their cohorts and clamping down on crime (while the prison population soars, or a scandal involving celebrities, or getting divorced or having a baby, or a child killed by a parent who should have had his parental rights terminated or been sent to jail a long time ago ,or a back and forth in arguments about gun control, or -- enough, you get the point. What will I do? I'll think about other former necessities that are now not worth my time.

More Later, Joe

Life After Life and Before

I doubt that the hereafter will hold anything as engrossing as our quadrennial presidential elections; as absorbing as the cultural and political clashes between the Eastern and Western worlds; as portentous as the debates about global warming and stem cell research, as much fun as the World Series and the Super bowl. Nor is the next world likely to offer the intriguing, awesome, ludicrous, shameful comic and noble manifestations of human conduct reported in the newspapers every day.

I would like to live long enough to know if there will be a cure for cancer; if there is life on other planets; if terrorism will be wiped out; how history will treat George W. Bush; how high and how low women's skirts will go; and if songs will ever sing again. I'd like to be around if and when the limits to the universe are discovered and when physicists find the tiniest bit of matter that can possibly exist. Will Social Security be saved and will scientists learn how memory works? There, from the cosmic to the comic, from the crises of life to its circuses, are reasons enough to be affectionately attached to living and living and living.

Have a Happy 4th of July!

More Later, Joe