HATS OFF TO THE STATE'S GREATEST PAPER
Nathan, George
J t a U Qjflf % 7^e Staie'i. QfiedteAi Pof^e/i, by George Nathan Of all the delights of the solar system there is none in which I more greedily indulge than the daily newspaper. O n tippy...
...And all FDR's secretaries devoured them...
...As he looked like Abraham Lincoln and smelled like Robin Hood, the times' correspondent herbert matthews perceived him as the answer to all Cuba's Social Problems and boomed him as a kind of prototype of Eugene McCarthy...
...Newspapers' influence here is awesome, yet I a m drawn to admit salutary...
...Intelligent editorials from our state's leading paper influence the state legislature more than alcohol...
...in America he is a scoundrel with a communicable disease...
...O n tippy toes I flutter at m y doorstep awaiting its heavenly descent...
...While Venezuela drowsed and Chile snored Cuba prospered...
...Andrew Jackson subscribed to as many as forty gazettes...
...Fidel Castro, was gaining a formidable reputation for raiding hen houses and pillaging garbage dumps...
...Juggling scholarship and myth these renowned euhemerists have recreated Paul Bunyan and John Henry given them Ivy League educations, baths, even the torch of reason...
...They live in a dream world of self righteousness, prejudice, incivism, irresponsibility and leftist fantasy, where their only fear is that they might be failing to meet their generation's dictate to conformity...
...For they have honed their skills to a fine edge...
...Does Herr Ulbricht ever refer to his paradise as the German Despotic Republic...
...After World War II that nation began to contrast sharply with the slumbering republics of Latin America...
...Chinese war lords, German corporals, Russian pooh-bahs, Latin American lovers and American aldermen all claim their thrones under the rubric democracy...
...Even the newspapers in Cuba began to take a shine to him...
...QfiedteAi Pof^e/i, by George Nathan Of all the delights of the solar system there is none in which I more greedily indulge than the daily newspaper...
...The Governor would hardly water his gubernatorial lawn without consulting the mourning newspaper...
...A number of years ago the pea-headed editor of the Louisville Courier Journal discovered the Social Problem of Southern segregation...
...sic) On they belched, repeating themselves and belaboring the obvious...
...The m a n was made for solving Social Problems, besides his brother was one...
...Truly almost any editorial scrawled in the Daily Stupid is insipid, pretentious, ignorant and grammatically incredible...
...To m e the daily paper, especially its editorial plate, represents most deliciously the characteristic phenomenon of American democracy — to wit: the right to act, and think imbecilically, and not be committed, the right to beget harm onto others with impunity, the right to lie avoiding all consequences, the right to sell moonshine and suffer no prohibition...
...Though their ideas are lofty, I hold as a certitude that they could communicate to the most primitive new yorker...
...Gaudily praising democracy's unrivalled freedom while milking it for all he can get, the journalist has become democracy's most poignant metonym — and democracy, let us remember, is the most formidable governing mode yet devised by history's marplots...
...Yet in Cuba's rural Oriente province a Harvard man, Dr...
...Harding would not have achieved half his grandeur had he not for years edited the distinguished Marion Star...
...I shall not burden you with their second big editorial which lectured the Governor on the compelling theme "Something is wrong somewhere" and implied the rather fabulous assumption that the Governor actually reads their nonsense...
...Their most effective technique is what we at your favorite family magazine refer to as the "tautological reminder...
...Yet for sheer ridiculousness it was fascinating to see the many ways dullards can express "gosh...
...Soon the times had stampeded Americans behind Dr...
...Thus not surprisingly, of all the world's journalists the American is most asinine...
...The Federalist Papers, was an assemblage of newspaper articles...
...Its editorials discourse on the most recondite Social Problems with a grace and flare that is never beyond the grasp of the meanest reader...
...If only their sophistication could somehow bear itself to the new york times...
...Their braying grew unendurable...
...sic) Notice the subtle majesty, brilliant insight, idiotic punctuation and of course the "tautological reminder...
...Alas even in our own enlightened commonwealth hardly a m a n attains high office who cannot read the newspaper...
...Editorials peaked beneath every sordid daguerreotype...
...H o w could Miami withstand such menacing contrast...
...Its growth rate rivalled that of Arkansas, and it threatened to bring civilization but ninety miles from our shores...
...Their ink ran red...
...Castro...
...His scribes set to work with the energy of a dipsomaniac loosed in a gin mill...
...Surely intending no effrontery to m y cousins, the scribes, I believe I have awarded them a compliment of the top chop...
...And sweating away in each of these disparate nations is an idiotic press whose index for the ridiculous grows in direct proportion to its democratic immaculacy...
...It is an assistance placed at the end of a sentence to remind amnesic readers of what comes at the sentence's beginning...
...Commonplace they assuredly are and in decline perhaps (after all McLuhan cannot always be wrong...
...Does Tito refer to himself as Exalted Dictator...
...Yet though a run through the editorial wind tunnel might leave the nation in racial chaos and reduce Cuba to thralldom, I a m compelled to admit newspapers' formidable hold on the national mind...
...Think of it...
...Here was a m a n who would feed the hungry, clothe the naked and shelter the homeless, if only given a chance — and a year's supply of chickens...
...It is then that the intelligent reader, immunized by congenital skepticism, sits back and roars while the urban yahoos run around stubbing their toes and performing rain dances...
...But the Journal is only our local joke...
...In editorial cloisters from new york to Los Angeles, from the rustic sties of the South to the Icicle State, idiots are daily sitting before their typewriters where with impudent pride they exhibit that democratic man, notwithstanding his packet of Compoz, remains a beast to be herded and stampeded by the rawest, most witless whoop...
...most hideous of all the island was governed by a family of Italians...
...country folk are all too familiar with the American tradition of the tall tale to take the times very seriously...
...Stupid scribes seem to feel the nation helplessly awaits their daily dose of moonshine...
...Artists and writers, businessmen and thinkers were bringing fresh vigor to Cuba's shores...
...The whole silly affair reached Wagnerian catastasis during the Selma impleasantness, in the aftermath of which the Journal offered a solution possessing all the realism of John Lindsay's ministry of N e w York or a C B S news broadcast...
...Where- ^ as idiot editors in the provinces merely transform Social Problems into chaos the editors of the times transform them into social injustices...
...Their influence is more certain than gravity and has been for many years...
...Their balling grew so plangent that the enlightened Senor Batista would endure it no longer...
...The bird wit who composed this gem should have his fingers cut off and his toes — anything to spare sapient man the embarrassment of possibly seeing such twaddle...
...The average journalist is as daft as a social worker, as dangerous as an affluent Arab, as deceitful as a Massachusetts senator, and as venal as a Supreme Court justice — the above average journalist is worse...
...If there is a leitmotif ringing through the chants of all the world's politicians it is their declaration of democratic purity...
...People of this ilk always m a n the front lines of conformity, but is it not an irony that they epitomize everything they profess to abhor...
...Did not newspapers exist even before Gutenberg mechanized gossip...
...It is the ignition for all m y bleary mournings, the stimulant for all m y days...
...The Journal's headlines screamed of injustice...
...It is alleged Calvin Coolidge could breeze through the nation's most influential papers in fifteen seconds...
...Where would the Sulzbergers' go for vacation...
...And is not Marshall McLuhan now intoning their final threnody...
...From here the Journal moved on to more alluring Social Problems leaving Southern Negroes alone to the charity of embittered Whites...
...But newspapers remain for m y every waking m o m the feast of m y mind's eye...
...The earliest symptom of this disease occurs when an editor discovers a Social Problem...
...Of course not, every nation on the globe claims to be the most democratic democracy of all...
...If we are to consider the national hysteria we must consider the new york times, America's guardian angel...
...In Russia the journalist is a clown with a pen...
...Truly its editorial treasures repose as one of the state's chief resources, a Hoosier glory looked to by readers for leadership and by politicians for assurance...
...What a shame that, though they write with unsurpassed authority and decorum, after four years writers of the Indiana Daily Stupid must retire to the dinginess of Paoli, Wheatfield or Gary, Indiana...
...Yet I still find them somehow wonderful, as democracy is wonderful, as a burlesque dancer is wonderful — it only wounds if you have married her...
...Examples of this solecistic stupidity abound, take for instance yesterday's masterpiece: Apollo 11, the editorial informed us, was about to be launched into space "on a bold new adventure which has never before been attempted by man...
...Though ever critical in matters of state and national polity, our paper has always envisioned Social Problems through prisms of rationality and proposed solutions conforming to this intelligent vision...
...Well, it all springs from m y irresistable infatuation with democracy...
...Today Cuba has regressed to the Latin American stone age, exporting only slobbering old peasants and espionage...
...the infectious stage arrives when he avers its crackpot solution...
...Consider this pearl from the first sentence of an editorial written during I. U.'s now legendary student boycott: "The end of the longest non-violent student protest in the history of this country is fast approaching an end...
...Under pseudonyms like Fulbright, Percy and Goldbrick they are portrayed as battling the forces of evil in a m o d e m setting that fools only the city slicker...
...They are democracy's darlings...
...America's only nonpathological contribution to democracy...
...They manifest neither individuality nor objectivity, and their editorials exhibit all the restraint of a nymphomaniac...
...H e lit out for Spain and the gates of Havana swung open to the rule of the chicken thief...
...Miami was saved, the Sulzbergers' could mimch MacDonald's hamburgers amidst pink, plaster flamingoes and every civilized man in Cuba became a head shorter...
...Consider their famous y a m about Cuba...
...The fact is, the Stupid serves as an extracurricular activity for a handful of illiterate bigots endowed with a $275,000 university grant for whining...
...Yet you may question how a person of m y extraordinary urbanity finds a mundane event like the daily paper so enchanting...
Vol. 3 • August 1969 • No. 1
