So I am tired in the wake of the midterm election,  and  have problems of my own… partially employed being one of them, and waiting to hear from the semi-interested agent if the latest book has a chance to rest in a publisher’s in-box rather than the unnoticed slush-pile being one of the others, and we can’t afford to go to Mom and Dad’s for Christmas this year, Spike the shih-tzu still isn’t housebroken and everything in my house that hasn’t been shredded by a cat has been pissed on by a dog. On top of this I have had to endure a week of non-stop, full-bore balls to the wall gloating by the so very, very superior and knowledgeable intellects at NPR …. Really, it’s enough to make one think seriously about being a hermit and canceling every subscription to every slightly to the left of center publication I have ever had… except that a lot of them were left to lapse after 9/11. Or they went out of business.  Hello, Brills’ Content!  Hello, Spy! … Where are you, now that we really need you!!!??? Harpers”? Ugh, there was Mom’s old quandary about Harpers’ or Atlantic— one or the other and couldn’t decide, so took both— 9/11 decided for us; up yours with a garden hose, Lewis Lapham, you nasty and arrogant old snob. Goodbye to Mother Jones, to Utne Reader, to the local edition of Current— a publication dedicated to progressive and politically correct -thinking, but apparently supported by the ad revenue generated from tittie bars and dubious personals. Ce la guerre.

 Time and Newsweek may fall of themselves soon… news that is a week old by the time it is printed seems like two weeks old to someone accustomed to scouting the internet. There may be a reason for them to exist these days, but damned if I can think of it. I can give them both up, as easily as the paladins of our free press surrendered the right of the people to know when it came to the Danish Mohammed cartoons. Man, they folded on that one faster than the French Army folded to the Germans in 1940. Even the French put up a bit of a fight way back then, but not so our fearless news media, with one or two honorable exceptions. If anything, the last couple of years have proved that fearless, unbiased and principled dedication to reporting all the news that is fit to print is as optional for our legacy media as underwear is to Paris Hilton. The same old media slime-balls— reporters and sources —- keep popping up, again and again like unsavory and un-flushable bits of sewage.

 No matter how many times they are caught out, debunked, corrected, displayed before the public as complete idiots, they’re back like Freddy the Slasher. Dan Rather just won’t go the hell away, neither will Sy Hersh, we’ll never hear the end of the  famous plastic turkey, Daniel Schorr, the Eyore of NPR is tiresomely still afflicting a newsroom… someone still pays Robert Fisk, although god knows why. No, it’s all enough to make me extremely tired, to know that all these and more are eagerly planning to cover naked truth with another expedient print petticoat.

And then to look away, and pretend they didn’t see a thing.

“”I am hurt, but I am not slain;

I’ll lay me down and bleed a while,

And then I’ll rise and fight again.”