Bad American

You know what’s the saddest thing in not having the Plain Dealer delivered to my store since April 1?

I don’t miss it at all.

Seriously, I’m not just saying that to be cute, in the grand scheme of my daily life, I just don’t miss it at all.

And the REALLY sad thing is that, after 30 plus years of having a daily newspaper delivered to me, whether it be in Ohio, Illinois or Iowa, I don’t miss not having it delivered at all.

f you had told me even 10 years ago that I would feel this way, I would have thought you didn’t know me very well.

After all, I was the kid who would run outside on a cold February afternoon to retrieve The Cleveland Press from a snowbank and bring it back to the warmth of our family living room to read from page to page, front to back.

And I was 11 years old.

Sad, really.

While on one hand, I do miss the reliability of having something to read with coffee and cereal, this laptop (not TV) has taken the place of the newspaper. And I do not miss all the garbage space taken up by discarded newspapers every week.

And I don’t have to even try to miss Kevin O’Brien’s weekly vomit in the Plain Dealer (or Ted Diadiun’s weekly excuse for that matter). And I don’t miss all the “lifestyle” crap that has all but crowded real in-depth news from most of America’s daily newspapers. No more having to see LeBron James on the front page. If aliens came from another planet and all they had to go by was the Plain Dealer, they’d have to assume that LeBron James was the King of Cleveland or some kind of local deity.

I saw the Plain Dealer at the local Wal-Mart the other day desperately trying to give free copies of the paper to people leaving the store. Poor guys: there were so few takers.

I have tried and tried and tried and tried for many years to get the editorial barons of the newspapers I have worked at lately - The Cedar Rapids Gazette, the Peoria Journal-Star especially, to do what was necessary to make their newspapers read and relevant again. But the people who are promoted to high levels in the field are not real journalists anymore but corporate hacks. In Diadiun’s case, he always WAS a corporate butt sucker - while I don’t know O’Brien’s history, one can reasonably assume he was never a friend to ordinary working people.

But hey, they have nice houses, decent cars and probably fun wives and isn’t that what people get into the business for anyway?

Professionalization. Send junior to J school and pretty soon he’ll be reporting the daily government news from the Green Zone in Baghdad like he/she actually believes it! All you have to do is be willing to sell your soul and life can be pretty good in the biz.

Oh hell, why bother? Roldo Bartimole has been writing the same things I do here only better and for over 30 years and exactly nothing has changed. And as long as the money men treat newspapers and media outlets like Wall Street profit centers, nothing will ever change. Because in our country and culture that’s all that matters.

So it’s essentially the useless ravings of a crank (in this case, me) who made the supreme mistake of falling in love early and hard with journalism just as it was becoming more of a business than a craft. Just before the First Amendment became a quaint anachronism of an America that probably never existed anyway; where now anything and everything is a marketable commodity and we don’t ever pause to think perhaps life might have meant more than that.

But if the corporate denizens that run newspapers and media outlets keep wanting to make the payments on their summer homes, they should heed well the reality that I am by no means, the only person who doesn’t miss their daily newspaper at all.