LETTERS FROM THE GLOBAL PROVINCE
Some News Fit to Print, Global Province Letter, 12 July 2018
There was once a bar across from the Times where the crowd repaired for drink after work. It was said by several wags that "they were packed in there five shallow."
Back When People Read. In the first half of the 2oth century, before commonsense and our capacity for fun began to unwind, New York had newspapers aplenty, most of which were better than the New York Times, such as the Journal American, the World Telegram, the Daily News, etc. Our so-called newspaper of record, the Times, was weighty (literally) but a bad read that, amongst other things, did not do a good job for its own community, New York City. Others served the locals much better. It could report on NATO or Washington, D.C., but never quite caught up with the corrupt newspaper unions, the mob, or the traffic snarls around town.
One night in the 1950's, Ted, a wonderful theater critic in Manhattan, when we were seeing a play on the Bowery, told me that journalists and men of affairs could deeply bewail the errors of NATO or the price of tea in China, but could not stop for a moment to give a bum a quarter for a drink. That seemed true of the worthies at the Times. They had no use for the insignificant, no matter how significant.
On Sunday then, we would read the Tribune and the Daily News, because they had funnies. More importantly, the Tribune, with its liberal Republican viewpoint, stuck to the middle of road, not serving the nominally leftist academic and professional classes whose biases the Times amplified. The Herald Tribune's voice said, "What fun!," not imitating the neurotics at the Times who moaned, "Gee, ain't it awful."
Now really a monopoly, with Rupert Murdoch's trashy Wall Street Journal (once a truly great newspaper) fading fast, the Times has descended rapidly—miserably edited, pitched at narrow constituencies, snatching business defeat from the jaws of victory due to defunct business leadership, and missing out on most of the important stories of our time. Since we last reviewed it in 2014, it has moved from struggling (but still insightful) to irrelevant. Its business section is passable, and its science section exemplary. Politics, culture, books, magazine, real estate, style, fashion, etc. are eyesores. Food, once a leader, starred Craig Claiborne, who, arguably, with Julia Child remade food in America. Now it is largely written by people with little taste or panache: it had the crown but now it does not even wear a hat. Most recently, the hapless management has wrecked the archives of the newspaper, once the most valuable jewel in the empire.
In days of yore, good things happened in the Times news bureaus, particularly overseas. Good people wanted to work there, and it was an open secret that one could do good things the farther away one got from headquarters in New York City. Now there is a talent gap at all levels in all places—poor reporting, miserable editorial, and an utter absence of fine writers. Who knows how one could straighten this out. Throughout our society, larger institutions of all sorts suffer from inertia and mediocre leadership; arthritis has inflamed the joints of Harvard, General Electric, AT&T, all our major church denominations, the Ford Foundation, and so on.
In fairness to journalists everywhere, it is hard to know what the real stories are in 2018. As we have said many times before, the significant developments now are happening in small countries under the radar. As in "Off the Map" (November 2004), the action is where we are not looking. Bhutan is the green country in Asia with abundant forests and even trained ecologists. Norway does a better job of dealing with plastics pollution than almost everybody, since it charges high deposits on plastic bottles and has disposal devices in its super markets. Denmark is the world leader in wind power, and Finland is a pathfinder in public health care. Dreary Canada, with its plain vanilla folks, supplies us with more funny comedians than the U.S. Argentina, in its bookshops and cafes and late serving restaurants, demonstrates a joy of life absent throughout the rest of North and South America. All this is hardly the grist of newspaper columns: it is not the stuff on which the editors dwell.
Dismal Times. As Hamlet was wont to say, "The time is out of joint. O cursed spite? That never I was born to set it right!" The world in 2018 is askew, nothing is as it should be. So it takes a offbeat mind to find out what it is going on. The denizens of the Times are not offbeat. They are middlebrow, rather dismal, conventional folks who delve into what they take to be big news and proclaim, "Where will it all end?"
Chances are that they are missing the real stories of our time. In addition, we suspect that an addiction to gloom and doom so fills the corridors of the newspaper that it is hard to write in an even-handed way, no matter the story. Unaccustomed to a world that is not like yesterday but compelled to travel a psychic trail where one's glass is always half full, the servants of the Times show no inclination to become masters of the universe. Instead, they are moaners and groaners.
Good News. The Times is now devoting pages 2 and 3 of every paper to navel gazing. We learn there how this or that reporter happened to do a particular story or take up a particular beat. There, for instance, we found out why a lady left the book section (she was tired of dotting i's and crossing t's) and became an obituary writer. Sadly we did not discover whether she attended the obit writer annual get-togethers, a number of which took place in Las Vegas, New Mexico.
Some Real News. Lately it has devoted its page 2 to good news on occasion, trying to prove that it can reach beyond angst. Maybe, just maybe, an editor or two is grasping that they have gotten it all wrong. At any rate, we regale you below with a whole rash of insignificant stories, which will surely lift your spirits, broaden your horizons, and reassure you that there is more to life than the mediocrities our media celebrate every day. They're not part of New York news or cable news, but just maybe they are the real news.
Bees Knees. Without bees, we can't feed ourselves and are at a loss for beauty in our gardens. We don't do as much as we might to protect our bees, but dogs, man's best friend, are looking out for the bees, too. Ms. Preston, the chief apiary inspector for the Maryland Department of Agriculture, uses dogs to check hives around the state, looking for bacteria that can decimate hives. To our amazement, we are finding out that the countryside may be antagonistic to bees: the British are finding that bees propagate better in London than on the farm, where pesticides and lack of flowers curb fertility. Curiously, urban beekeepers may be up to the task of filling our world with urban hives. Just this year, 3 million bees were sold to bee masters at Bryant Park, right in the heart of Manhattan. Hmm, bee news is not everybody's cup of tea; yet if the bees go away, we cease to exist.
The Independent Book Store. As Amazon takes over the world, independent book stores are in decline. It is legitimate to wonder if the rise of the big box stores, Amazon included, are leading to illiteracy. Certainly they push the titles that all of us can afford to skip. Yet one store is hanging on in Scotland. It's a curious affair, as told in "Renting a Scottish Bookstore, for a Day." "A bookstore in the village of Wigtown, Scotland, allows people to run the shop while renting an apartment upstairs. A book critic for The Times recently took his turn at the till." Dwight Garner, the best writer at the Times (it used to have a flock of good writers but they're all gone now), is the odd fellow who got himself to the old sod. He adored his stay at the Open Book. He even took in the Bookshop Band, an outgrowth of this fine establishment. Is it possible, we ask, that we might read again if we all put in time working at a bookshop? Is it possible that we might have non-hormone, real meat if we all did a little cutting at a small butcher. Certainly it would improve the Times food section if its staff knew something about food and meat.
Pebbles That Are Really Boulders. Dog Teaches Love. Ireland's Foremost Cook Dies. New Wind in New Bedford. Marine Woman Air Pilot Faster Than the Horses in Kentucky. In fact, somehow little tales creep into the Times that loom large. An Iranian lady never had thought much of dogs, particularly the family dog Nutella. But then her husband came down with gruesome headaches in Munich, and a caring Nutella by his side nursed him back to health. Mrs. Dumas learned much about love from her dog: she fell in love with him.
Ireland's First Lady of Cuisine Moves On. Thirty years ago we went to County Cork, mostly to stay and eat with Myrtle Allen at her farm outside Cork, known at Ballymaloe, in Shangarry. The children harvested eggs for breakfast right from the coop in front of the house. Very fresh fish of the day (we do not have the like) came from a few miles away: dinner was truly from the land and sea to the table. On our return to the States, a foodie editor at one of the caloric magazines of the day asked, " How was the weather?" We said, "Great." "And the food?" was her follow on. We told her "absolutely fabulous. "You weren't in Ireland," she retorted. Like all know-it-all New Yorkers, she didn't know. As in many countries, the capitals never provide the best food: we think of Dublin, Bangkok, Washington, etc. The capitals of quality do not house politicians or kings.
New Bedford Has the Wind at its Back. Offshore wind power is coming to life in New Bedford and through the waters of New England. For years Senator Edward Kennedy blocked wind projects around Cape Cod and Nantucket, since it would blemish the view from family estates. But now, wind power both on land and sea is blossoming, following Europe's lead, which has pushed this nonpolluting source of electricity.
True Grit. Amy McGrath inherited the incredible willpower of her mother, who despite paralysis from polio, brought up a wonderful, talented family and became a doctor besides. Amy was the first woman Marine jet pilot. Retired, she has just won in the Democratic primary for her district in Kentucky. She comes from horse country, and she was way back in the pack but surged to lead the other candidate by 6 or so points. Her mother Marianne is as proud as she can be. Amy credits all her victories to her mother.
P.S. Researchers are beginning to understand a lot more about pain. There is normal pain, say the shock you feel from a burn or a twist of part of the body But the scientists now distinguish this from chronic pain, an extra layer of severe pain that sets into people as they become exposed to more and more incidents of normal pain. The second type of pain—chronic—affects a large part of the American population. We think it is fair to assume that acute pain can be an addictive way of life, something that springs up all too easily in a social atmosphere focused on pain. The Times seems to be that way. For more on a world where pain becomes a way of life, read "The Neuroscience of Pain," The New Yorker, July 2, 2018.
P.P.S. Why is it, you may ask, that journalist and opinion makers and policy wonks miss the real drift of society? Christopher Hitchens, the late departed sharply spoken essayist, may have gotten it right. All the players in the opinion game tend to bite their lips when their words may get too close to the truth. Holding back, they forget how to say it like it is. Self censorship. To those who want to hear more about this, see Christopher Hitchens: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series)
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