I didn’t watch the debate. I came home from lifeguarding ravenous, inhaled a metric ton of pasta, did a little work and went to bed. I’m put off by the endless, ENDless pregaming for these events, the boners sprung by the entire Politico staff, all of it. I asked myself, will anything that happens tonight change my vote? It will not. I figured if Vance ripped open his shirt to show off his new swastika tattoo, I’d hear about it later. So I skipped. Sorry not sorry.

From what I’m reading this morning, I didn’t miss a thing. Republicans think Vance cleaned Walz’ clock, Democrats vice versa. Yawn.

I continue to worry about current events, don’t you fret about that. The Last Good Year is inching toward its finale, one ballistic-missile attack at a time. I read a thread yesterday about the longshoremen’s strike, and about the cozy relationship between the union president and Fat Orange Elvis, and it sounded like the girl in “Jaws” who’s trying to tell the panicking crowd on the beach the shark isn’t there, it’s over here. Last good year.

Speaking of Politico, et al, my friend Ryan — literally half my age, a former student, and author of the Last Good Year theory — said something the other day in our group chat that I’ve been mulling ever since. He said we were a better-informed nation under the old system of media-as-gatekeeper than we are today, which is in large part the utopia the earliest bloggers (99 percent of whom gave it up) dreamed of, back when we were invading Iraq and everything was democracy-whiskey-sexy. “The MSM is a lecture. The web is a conversation,” etc. I think James Lileks said that, and the whole warblog crew lifted him aloft and proclaimed him the pundit in whom they most trusted. (Note that he not only didn’t quit his six-figure MSM job — hard to find another humor columnist opening in our shrinking world — but now that his column has finally been taken from him, retaining his job, he has not ceased bitching about it.)

Anyway, don’t want to re-plow that ground. My point is, the old system wasn’t so terrible, even as flawed as it was. I’m a news junkie, and I only learned of the impending longshoreman’s strike…last weekend, I believe. And now it’s upon us, and it’s not even Wednesday. Once upon a time, an army of labor reporters would have kept us up to date for weeks, maybe months, ahead of the strike, and we’d at least have had time to process it, call our elected representatives, etc. Now there are hardly any labor reporters. One I follow is on Substack, essentially self-employed.

The old gatekeepers were overwhelmingly white and male, also older and well-to-do, if not rich. This undoubtedly left many stories uncovered. It also allowed a rich vein of alt-journalism to flourish, in the ethnic presses and the free weeklies in every city. One made their money on lower-cost advertising targeted directly at their readers, the other on racy personals and ads for escorts and strippers.

And what replaced this terrible system? Some marquee brands (NYT, WP) survive, a handful of nonprofit, serious news sites (MinnPost, Texas Tribune, the outfit I used to work for) and a whole lot of clickbait. Plus, a form of human clickbait — the influencer. The friend who likes all the things you like, will tell you about the things they like (use their product code for 10 percent off and free shipping) and lies happily to your face, but you like those lies, so it’s OK.

And don’t get me started on social media, the great bullshit amplifier of our age. I used to correct people who posted urban legends on Facebook as though they were facts, but I don’t anymore, because I was so often accused of being, essentially, a party pooper. Let people believe, etc. OK.

Don’t get me wrong. Some of these innovations have been welcome. We’re all busy. It’s nice to have some filters in our lives to productively direct our moments when we can be free to pay attention to the world outside our own bubble. And many podcasts are miles better than the hollowed-out husk of commercial radio. But for all the information we process from day to day — that I process, anyway — I still feel like there are yawning gaps in my knowledge.

And I know there are some in yours.

Anyway, that’s my rant for the day. Maybe some photos? OK. A yard sign a few blocks over:

Also, speaking of the MSM, I think this story is the very last place for a play-on-words headline, but no one asked me:

Fibs, not vicious lies, and “dog,” get it? HAHAHAHA.

Talk later.

I expect by now the outrageous tale of Judge Kenneth King of the 36th District Court here in Detroit has spread to your neck of the woods, but just in case it hasn’t…

Judge King is something of a showboat. No, he is a shameless showboat, no something about it. His courtroom actions are streamed on his YouTube channel, and you know what they say about courtroom cameras — sooner or later, someone’s going to play to them, and in this case, it’s the judge. He seems to consider himself an undiscovered court-TV personality, and has a fan group that he regularly interacts with on Facebook.

So the other day a local nonprofit brought a group of teens to his courtroom on a field trip, and one of them, Eva Goodman, fell asleep during the judge’s talk to the group. He didn’t take this well:

After speaking for about 45 minutes, King walked over to the young woman and screamed, “wake up!” Then he asked if he was boring her, before suggesting “there’s one in every group.”

Alas, Eva was very tired that day, and fell asleep again. Well. This was too much for King:

He ultimately decided she needed to “take a walk in the back to see where we keep our people who are disrespectful to the court.”

On Wednesday, King told the Free Press he felt disrespected mainly by her body language.

About two hours later, he had court staff bring her back into the room. At this point she’s wearing a green jumpsuit, the words “Wayne County jail” printed on the back. Her hands are cuffed in front of her body.

…Jumping from his seat, King repeatedly questions the young woman before offering his own comments.

“You sleep at home in your bed, not in court. And quite frankly, I don’t like your attitude,” King said.

Yes. He had this sleepy girl dressed in jail clothing, handcuffed and then? He held a mock trial, of sorts, and threatened her with juvenile detention. You really should read the story. It’s amazing.

But it gets worse. It turns out the reason the girl kept falling asleep? Her family is homeless. Not living-on-the-street homeless, but the more common variety of bouncing around from place to place with her mother and siblings, and the previous night had been a rough one. This came out later, when the circle of people who know about King’s courtroom had expanded well beyond his fan group.

The best thing written about it was this column by a Freep contributor, who pointed out, correctly, that this is one reason black teens run from police, etc.:

(H)is actions reinforced the pipeline to prison culture that community activists are continually fighting against. That culture includes everything from metal detectors and uniforms in public schools to forcing young people to cut their hair because it’s too long, or suggesting that wearing a hoodie or engaging in other normal teen activities are inherently suspicious and must be policed.

Precisely. It needs to be pointed out, again and again until people get it, that the reason Ferguson, Mo. exploded 10 years ago wasn’t the death of Michael Brown, but the years-long abuse of poor people by not only the police, but the entire judicial system, and you should read Radley Balko on this subject:

After the death of Michael Brown, we learned that black and poor residents of St. Louis County were essentially treated like walking ATMs. The mid-20th Century migration of white people to the suburbs, and then the exurbs — and their attempt to exclude black people each step of the way — resulted in an astonishing number of tiny “postage stamp” municipalities, most of which had their own police department and were funded by fines and fees imposed on their residents. The poorer the town, the more it needed fines and fees to operate.

Anyway, things aren’t going so well for King at the moment. His docket has been taken from him, he lost a teaching gig at Wayne State, and he’ll be lucky to keep his job, although he probably will, unless Fox News snatches him up and makes him a member of The Five or something.

But enough about him. Let’s turn instead to the turgid prose of Tim Goeglein, who apparently has found a sucker editor at the surviving daily in Fort Wayne, the Journal Gazette, willing to publish his columns:

He writes on Sunday of his misty water-colored memories of going to the Embassy Theater downtown to see old movies with Ma and Pa Goeglein:

The rain was pouring in monsoon-like waves in downtown Fort Wayne. The cars were splashing buckets-full of water hither and yon. People were skittering across the puddled streets like stones across ponds.

Everyone was being lashed by the fury of a Midwestern downpour, a soaker.

The windshield wipers clicking at record speed, my father pulled up our maroon Jim Kelley Buick LaSabre to the front doors of the Embassy Theatre on West Jefferson Boulevard.

All I remember seeing was a forest of umbrellas amid the bright, luminous, brilliant, beautiful lights of that singularly familiar Embassy marquee flashing its message: “Friday Nights at the Movies.”

Tim owns a thesaurus, but hasn’t absorbed the message that you don’t have to use all the synonyms when you look up an adjective.

It goes on — and on and on and on — until it reaches a sloppy climax with what else? The organ recital that preceded the movie:

We found seats midsection, and then, as if on cue, rising like a phoenix from the floor, as if out of nowhere, a kind of magic happened: the most glorious, riveting tones of a colossal organ as if from the highest plain of heaven.

Pipes of every tone and tempo kept us awash in the glory of pure sound, a kind of elixir for the ears.

It was the Grande Page Pipe Organ, rising before us as if from the MGM soundstage in Hollywood itself. Has there ever been a more amazing instrument in the history of our nation?

Well, yes, Tim. These theater organs were quite common in old movie houses. There was one in Columbus, which I heard when my mom took me to the old-movie screenings at the Ohio Theater there. There’s one in Detroit, at the Redford Theater. But I’m amazed at Tim’s amazement: Pipes “of every tone and tempo.” The “most glorious, riveting tones.” The MOST AMAZING INSTRUMENT IN THE HISTORY OF OUR NATION.” I’d think he was kidding if I didn’t know he wasn’t.

After one of his last columns, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Journal Gazette. Cruelly, they didn’t print it. So I will copy/paste it here:

I haven’t lived in Fort Wayne for nearly 20 years, but given the role I played in the loss of his White House job, I’ve since taken a particular interest in Timothy Goeglein’s writing, appearing occasionally in the JG’s opinion section. As a writer myself, and as one who wants everyone to be a better one, sometimes this is painful; I’ve rarely seen such floridly composed word salads, to use a phrase Tim might employ. I won’t call them “hate reads” — I’m trying to be a better person in my dotage — but my fingers often twitch toward an imaginary blue pencil to strip the lard, the filigree, and especially the adverbs out of his rhapsodical tributes to whatever misty water-colored memory is striking him today.

I’m also an editor, and know that self-editing is difficult. But can’t anyone at the Journal Gazette take a little hot air out of these balloons, perhaps by paring Tim’s “tall and willowy, thin as a rail” piano teacher down to just “willowy,” as that word literally means tall and thin? Or suggest that “a museum specializing in great art” redundantly states the definition of art museums, unless he knows of one that specializes in mediocre stuff.

To Tim, I offer my services as a writing coach. My email’s easy to find. Give me one paragraph, 100 words tops, on…something you dislike. Tight. No adverbs. We’ll start there. It may be a journey of a thousand miles, but it’s gotta start somewhere.

He won’t take me up on it. Sigh.

OK, Monday looms. Punch it in the face!

I’ve mentioned this here before, but for you folks who need a catch-up: I got a new phone a year ago, and no matter what I do, I cannot get it to stay paired with my car’s sound system. So rather than spend any more time trying to make it work, I have been listening to over-the-air radio on trips around town. (For longer ones, I have a small speaker I just stick in the console.)

Anyway, there’s an AM station here, CKWW, out of Windsor. It’s automated, which means a visit to “the studios” will find no people, and only a desktop computer cycling through the playlists. I read somewhere they use the playlists of the legendary CKLW, the old 50,000-watt behemoth of the golden olden days of AM radio. But it’s only 500 watts, which means it’s hard to pick up on the west side of Detroit. Fortunately, I spend most of my time on the east side.

Honestly, I’m kind of philosophically opposed to oldies radio, but sometimes NPR just gets to be too much to take. And while it’s interesting to go spelunking in the no-higher-than-30-40 range of 1970’s charting hits, what has really captured my interest are the newscasts at the top of the hour.

CKLW, back in the day, leaned hard into Detroit crime, and its “20-20 News” was designed to capitalize on it. It was tabloid, lurid and sometimes alliterative: “The battered body of a buxom blonde bounced once and came to rest on the sidewalk,” “The blood-smeared highways of Michigan claimed 14 more lives over Labor Day weekend,” and if you like this sort of thing, this 10-minute compilation is spectacular.

But CKWW’s news is distinctly…Canadian. The other day they reported on a bicycle theft, complete with a detailed description of the crime, the victim, and a description of the suspect. Yesterday a similarly comprehensive report was delivered, on a man who “committed an indecent act” in a public park, complete with a sketch of the perp available on the station’s website. This the tenor of the crime reports, day after day.

Now, I know Windsor isn’t some paradise. However, I also know that on a different Canadian station I used to listen to, around the new year there was a report on how often police had used force on arrestees, prisoners, etc. It was a little jarring; around here, where cops shoot people fairly often, the Canadian report mostly concentrated on the use of nightsticks. So I think it’s fair to assume the city across the river is a quieter, less violent place.

I wonder what it’s like to live like that.

In other news at this hour, I watched “Jaws” again last night, for the first time in a while. For all the talk about the mechanical shark failing to work, why doesn’t anyone mention the opening sequence, which covers maybe 20 minutes of action but starts in full darkness, switches to early-evening gloom, then pre-sundown, then just after sundown, before going back to full night? Damn amateurs.

Wait. I see someone has indeed discussed this.

Happy Wednesday.

I guess it was back at Barrington Elementary School, and it must have been early in the year, because we were talking about the just-concluded Olympic Games — this had to have been 1968, I guess — and one of my classmates asked, “Who won the Olympics?” The teacher explained that no one country “wins” the Olympics, that athletes compete under their own flags and win individual events, but the whole spectacle was about international fellowship and friendship.

Yeah, tell that to Dick Ebersol, amirite? As I recall, he was the one who instituted medal counts, first on NBC, which jingoistic editors later adopted for newspapers, and so on and so on.

Since we have to live with medal counts, here’s an unpopular opinion: I like it when American athletes, especially those who are favorites, are upset in their events. My all-time favorite might be when the American men’s basketball team had to settle for bronze in the 2004 games. And I realize it’s not the athletes losing that gives me this grim joy, but the insane, over-emphasis on American athletes, especially in the handful of prime-time sports that NBC shamelessly milks for pathos — gymnastics, swimming, track and a few others. Because I’ve spent my career in media, I can’t watch a closeup of Simone Biles sitting on the sideline without reverse-angling through the fourth wall. I know she’s surrounded by photographers and lenses capturing her every nose-scratch, and while I don’t want her to crash and burn — excuse me, for her Olympic dreams to vanish, I do want NBC to think, just for a few minutes, whether maybe another sport might be worthy of a little bit of attention.

Alan told me about kayak cross, a new sport this cycle, described by a writer for New York magazine as “a kind of mix between a ski slalom and white-water rafting and something you would see on one of the silly game shows that air on ABC in the summer where people risk bodily injury for small cash prizes. It is easily the most ‘should be narrated by a B-list comedian’ event at the Olympics. People in the crowd at Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium should have airhorns. These are the highest compliments I know how to give.” That is an excellent description; the videos are hilarious. Can we get a little comic relief between closeups of Simone Biles looking fierce and determined? Just a little?

I mean, I look at the clips that turn up in social-media feeds, and it’s often the weirdo sports like artistic swimming. There’s definitely an audience for this. You know what the most shared track-and-field clip was in recent days? The French pole vaulter who brought down the bar with his sizable penis, but did we see that on NBC? No. (OK, maybe we did. I didn’t watch every second in recent days. But I doubt it.)

Fortunately, other media outlets are still practicing journalism:

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A post shared by The Washington Post (@washingtonpost)

You should watch that. It’s good.

Now I’m watching diving. One of the things I like about the Olympics is the way different sports reward different body types, and no group excels at flinging their bodies through the air like compact Asian people. These Chinese women are amazing; they barely make splashes.

In other news at this hour, Tim Walz! That was a good introductory speech. Still not taking anything for granted, because man, these Republicans get scarier every day.

Like many of you, I’ve been watching the Olympics this week. Only the primetime stuff, and I’m not squeamish about spoilers. I know, for instance SPOILER ALERT that Simone Biles killed it today, and the women’s gymnastics team won the gold. I mean, if I wanted to be surprised I wouldn’t be on the internet all day. I’ll watch anyway.

In the course of it, I may see this commercial, called “Dear Sydney.” In it, a father asks Google’s AI function to help his daughter write a fan letter to a track star. “She wants to show Sydney some love, and I’m pretty good with words, but this has to be just right,” he says.

I hate this fucking thing. As the New York story points out:

What? Why would a dad who is “pretty good with words” need an AI model to help his daughter write a heartfelt message to her favorite athlete? Aren’t these moments what parenthood is all about? What sort of lesson is this? Not only does it imply to your kid that it’s okay to offload writing assignments to AI, it also suggests it’s a good idea to let the computer express feelings for you, which may be a troubling precedent.

Troubling? When your kid gets caught using AI to write a term paper in high school, don’t cry about unequal treatment, dad. You started her down this path. Weird, too, that I had almost this exact thought, too:

Brand strategist Michael Miraflor wrote that the ad was quite similar to the Apple iPad commercial from May that was widely reviled. “They both give the same feeling that something is very off, a sort of tone-deafness to the valid concerns and fears of the majority,” he wrote, adding that both were developed in-house.

Yeah. What tf is going on in Silicon Valley? I want AI to do the boring shit so I can concentrate on stuff I want to do, not the other way around. Sydney should return Google’s money and tell that little pixie to leave time in her life for English class.

In other news at this hour, Kamala Harris has texted me 9,000 times to inform me she’s running for president. (You’re kidding, I hadn’t heard.) Then she asks for money. I sent her some. But I have yet to see a significant attack ad on Trump, and I’m ready for it. You have money, Democrats! You’re raising millions and millions! The “weird” thing is fine, but it’ll be played in about 5 minutes, and I expect to see a LOT of advertising talking about what a threat Trump is. Yes, a threat to democracy, and I don’t care if these weird right-wing pundits blame that line for the shooting in Pennsylvania. It doesn’t make it any less true, so lean in! Get going!

And that is all for a muggy Tuesday.

An old colleague had a story about a topic we’ve discussed here a time or two, i.e., the decline of local journalism:

CHEBOYGAN — They painted over the Cheboygan Daily Tribune sign last week, the letters loaded into the back of a pickup truck and the dark blue bricks disappearing under a coat of fuchsia. Inside the old Main Street building, where once reporters pecked away on stories about the city council, there’s now a shop selling medieval goods and swords.

…The local newspaper still exists online and residents can grab a thin printed copy at Family Fare Supermarket, but the stories within it often aren’t focused on Cheboygan.

The Daily Tribune employs one sports reporter, but no local news reporters to report on happenings in this Lake Huron community, 15 miles southeast of Mackinaw City, leaving residents to scour Facebook and a weekly shopper publication for information on elections and tax increases.

This is happening…everywhere, but especially in smaller cities and towns. Last week we talked about a would-be mass shooter in Fort Wayne, stopped only by his own incompetence, covered as little more than a routine police story. The great piece about the con artist from a local high school? Nothing. The mayor died a few weeks ago (covered), but the caucus to replace him? Not well covered. And so on, and not to single out Fort Wayne media. This is happening everywhere.

The result? Well, get this, a poll published in The Detroit News on the eve of the Mackinac Policy Conference, where Detroit’s big shots get together, drink and claim to be thisclose to reaching consensus on how the drive the state forward:

A new survey of Michigan voters suggests their trust is declining in the institution of democracy, the value of a college education and the stability of the economy, even among those who say they’re personally doing better than before the COVID pandemic.

The poll also asked about whether the use of force, threats or violence is justified under any circumstances in a democracy, and 35% of poll respondents said they believe it is.

Separately, 5% of Michigan voters said that violence is justified if their preferred candidate for president loses the 2024 election after all votes are counted “fairly.” Ninety percent said there would be no justification for violence in that case.

…”One thing we’re seeing not just in this survey, but in a multitude of surveys, is voters no longer can agree on some basic facts. We are in this era of misinformation,” said pollster Richard Czuba, founder of the Glengariff Group who conducted the survey. “And because we can’t agree on facts, they can’t analyze the basic fundamentals of what they’re seeing in front of them.”

This, more than anything else, is contributing to my Last Good Year mood. Because this, more than anything, shows the end result of not only the hollowing out of local news sources, but the rise of partisan sources as well.

Ignore the democracy questions; just take the college-education piece. There are a lot of things wrong with higher ed, starting with its cost but also including an explosion of what you might call “college,” i.e. for-profit outfits that charge like Harvard for worthless “degrees” that could be gained for a fraction of the cost at a local community college. But for students who attend a four-year school and graduate, the future is brighter than it would be for those with less education; even with all its problems, college grads out-earn those with no degree by hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a lifetime.

But college is another thing the right-wing media will tell you is wrong, because Woke, because a conservative speaker was booed offstage somewhere. (I always want to ask these people: How about your kids? Are you sending them to an HVAC certification program or, say, Dartmouth, just like mom and dad?)

I bring all this up because the Luckiest Man in Journalism, i.e. James Lileks, who’s been hanging on to a humor / local-whimsy / architecture column in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, has been informed he’ll no longer be a columnist come August, when the paper is relaunching, or something. (This according to his blog, where he tries and fails to not seem self-pitying.) I’m sure some people will miss him, and I’m equally sure a few of his right-wing friends will try a shame-the-Strib campaign, the way they did the last time he was threatened with having to cover an actual meeting or fatal accident or whatever. I can’t get too happy about this; I lost a column once upon a time, too, and it’s a blow to be sure. But we are now in battle-stations mode, and everybody drawing a paycheck needs to be covering news. It’s too important, even though I fear the battle is already mostly lost.

From Ron’s story about Cheboygan:

In those communities, residents sometimes struggle to keep up with local news that impacts their lives far more profoundly than news that’s easy to find on Fox or social media.

“The chronicling of a small town, that historic record-keeping, has faded,” said Jill Josef Greenberg, a former employee at the Cheboygan paper.

“I wonder who will tell the story of these resilient people?”

I don’t know, but we’re about to find out.

I’ve told you about my friend Ryan’s Last Good Year theory, haven’t I? Can’t find it in search, but the idea is simple, and this: 2024 is the United States’ last good year. If Trump wins, it’s all over — this we know. If Trump doesn’t win, it’ll be all over, but in a different way: Likely violence, even more yammering about election fraud, even more screeching from the Halls of Congress, etc. Perhaps Marge Green will show up in a lucha libre mask next January. Maybe Lindsay Graham will get a Trump tattoo on his chest. (Probably he already has one, but on his butt.) Either way, 2025 will be worse than 2024.

So enjoy 2024. Might as well.

I came home from lifeguarding last night to learn that Justice Samuel Alito has been flying yet another problematic flag at his multiple houses, this one the Appeal to Heaven banner:

Also known as the Pine Tree flag, it dates back to the Revolutionary War, but largely fell into obscurity until recent years and is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.

Three photographs obtained by The New York Times, along with accounts from a half-dozen neighbors and passers-by, show that the Appeal to Heaven flag was aloft at the Alito home on Long Beach Island in July and September of 2023. A Google Street View image from late August also shows the flag.

The photographs, each taken independently, are from four different dates. It is not clear whether the flag was displayed continuously during those months or how long it was flown overall.

But oh my, Nina Totenberg was friends with Ruth Bader Ginsburg! Oh my oh my oh my liberal bias in the media!

I should note that I disapprove of Totenberg having such a personal relationship with a person she covers. But Alito and his openly displayed political opinions are worse, by far.

So now we have two utterly, thoroughly corrupt justices, a probable third (Kavanaugh), and lord knows what fun Amy Barrett has in store for us.

Enjoy 2024! It’s the last good year!

It’s been hot this week, too hot for May, mid- to upper 80s all week. But it’s better here than it’s been in the South and central Plains, scoured by tornados this week. And at least rising sea levels aren’t flooding septic systems in Michigan. So for a Last Good Year, it won’t be a terrible one.

Meanwhile, I just opened the Axios Detroit newsletter to find they linked to my 2020 column on Mitch Albom for Deadline Detroit (it’s his birthday). STILL RELEVANT, MOFOS. As it turns out, I cannot get my phone to stay linked to my car’s sound system, so I’ve been listening to the radio far more than in the past. My 8-minute drive to lifeguarding coincides with NPR’s dreariest segment, and so I migrate over to WJR, and often catch a bit of Mitch’s talk show. It’s easy to see how his op-ed column became 800 words of blather; he’s just imitating the standard midrange talk-radio “discussion.” You say something anodyne and dull (“I’m no fan of Donald Trump, but Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen are bad people, too”), then say it again in different words, listen to your co-host/producer agreeing with you — because no one disagrees with Mitch — say it again, etc.

But he’ll be there until they dynamite him from his seat. Maybe it’ll happen in 2024, and then it’ll really be the last good year.

OK, then, Thursday awaits. Enjoy yours.

Back home again. It’s been a week of jet lag, held-mail sorting, and of course re-immersion in the toxic politics of the Land of the Free. Congratulations to all who voted for Nikki Haley in Indiana. Pulling 20 percent when you’re not even in the race bodes well for the Dems in November, but I’m not in the prediction business. The Politico piece on the primary that you guys have already chewed over underscores something that’s happening everywhere, i.e. the nationalization of every election, no matter how small.

I noticed one of the candidates for Indiana governor led with her proposal to eliminate all propertyincome taxes. Which is already laughable, as Hoosier property owners pay pocket change in property taxes. In the olden days, say 10 years ago, someone would have asked her how she planned to pay for such a drastic policy change, but given the diminishment of local and even statewide news coverage, that won’t happen. It doesn’t matter now, because she lost, but still. There’s a movement to eliminate property tax in Michigan, but they need to get a shitload of signatures to get that one on the ballot, and I doubt they’re having much luck, the movement being mainly comprised of MAGA goobers.

Speaking of diminished local media, here’s a great but unfortunately paywalled story about Gannett’s firing of a west-Michigan journalist, an editor, who led the way on coverage of Ottawa Impact, the right-wing group that took over Ottawa County’s commission, making national news in the process (free link). The oafs who roared into office have behaved like the Three Stooges, unable to conduct the simplest government business without poking one another in the eye, etc. They hired a losing congressional candidate to be county executive, and fired him a year later. The health director dug in her heels when they tried to defund the entire department, and they threw money at her to leave, but when the amount was made public ($4 million), the public objected, Larry stepped on Moe’s foot, etc., and they eventually retreated. (They wanted to replace her with a COVID nut, whose public-health qualifications consisted of being a health and safety officer for an HVAC company, with the online degrees to prove it.)

Anyway, this woman, Sarah Leach, covered it all. And get this:

Leach oversaw news operations at the Holland Sentinel and 25 other newspapers across four states — 15 in Michigan, eight in Wisconsin, two in South Dakota and one in Minnesota — the largest group within Gannett’s Center for Community Journalism division.

She handled budgeting, hiring, goal-setting and managed overtime. Short-staffed on local editors, she was also editing and managing reporters at three of the newspapers herself: the Daily Telegram in Adrian, the Hillsdale Daily News and the Monroe News.

This is Gannett these days. Many of these papers are entirely ghost ships, assembled remotely with wire copy and press releases. Leach had complained about Gannett’s empty promises to increase staffing to a writer for the Poynter Institute, a journalism nonprofit that tries to hold the industry to account. She wasn’t quoted by name, and she suspects the suits accessed her work emails to find out she was the whistleblower. She was fired over Zoom:

“I was asked, ‘Why did you do this?’ And I just stared at the screen for a long time because it was difficult to process what this moment was,” Leach recounted.

“I admitted that I had a phone call with this person, you know, because I am dying. I have been asking for resources, and I’m doing my best to try to serve these communities to the best of my ability, and I feel like I can’t. … Then I was informed that was my last day.”

I wonder about the person who swung the sword. Traditionally, publishers and executive editors start as reporters or other low-level employees. Anyone old enough to have that kind of job today probably has at least a dim memory of what it was like to work in a newsroom that wasn’t an echoing space. And today they’re the goon tasked with firing a good employee. One who did this:

Leach jumped in last January to help cover the crush of Ottawa Impact news when the Sentinel was down to just one full-time reporter. She soon became the face of the paper’s coverage, striving to explain to the community the unprecedented nature of the board’s sweeping new decisions and their potential effects.

A trio of retired journalists in the community elevated Leach’s work for the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting last fall, with the nomination citing the 130-plus stories she’d written. The nomination letter also noted the Sentinel’s subscriptions had surged 38% at that point in the year, making it the fastest-growing website in Gannett’s division for small newspapers.

One significant obstacle noted by the nominating committee is that Ottawa Impact commissioners generally refuse to answer questions or be interviewed by mainstream news reporters, though Leach tried to fairly represent their views anyway, according to the committee.

“More than any other journalist she has held our local elected officials accountable. We need her to preserve democracy in this town,” said Milt Nieuwsma, a retired journalist and author who was part of the nominating committee.

Well, too bad, Milt.

Which leads us to this:

The new iteration of “The Office” has been picked up to series at Peacock.

According to the official logline, the series will focus on “a dying historic Midwestern newspaper and the publisher trying to revive it with volunteer reporters.” https://t.co/HfMJ65oK73 pic.twitter.com/xRV0EHs30j

— Variety (@Variety) May 8, 2024

We laugh to keep from crying. Have a great weekend, all.

An acquaintance back in Fort Wayne has taken to sending me Tim Goeglein columns, which are appearing with increasing frequency in the Journal Gazette, the surviving daily newspaper. The latest one was the usual cliché-strewn mess, a reminiscence about his childhood piano teacher who gave him his love of music and once played the most beautiful piece he’d ever heard or ever will hear, etc. (It’s not paywalled, unless you’ve reached your three-article limit for the month, so hey — enjoy.) I read it twice, then drafted a letter to the editor, which I let marinate through the day. I don’t think I’m going to send it, but in the interest of not letting 250 words go to waste, I’ll paste it here:

I haven’t lived in Fort Wayne for nearly 20 years, but given the role I played in the loss of his White House job, I’ve since taken a particular interest in Timothy Goeglein’s writing, appearing occasionally in the JG’s opinion section. As a writer myself, and as one who wants everyone to be a better one, sometimes this is painful; I’ve rarely seen such floridly composed word salads, to use a phrase Tim might employ. I won’t call them “hate reads” — I’m trying to be a better person in my dotage — but my fingers often twitch toward an imaginary blue pencil to strip the lard, the filigree, and especially the adverbs out of his rhapsodical tributes to whatever misty water-colored memory is striking him today.

I’m also an editor, and know that self-editing is difficult. So can’t anyone at the Journal Gazette take a little hot air out of these balloons, perhaps by paring Tim’s “tall and willowy, thin as a rail” piano teacher down to just “willowy,” as that word literally means tall and thin?

To Tim, I offer my services as a writing coach. My email’s easy to find. Give me one paragraph, 100 words tops, on…something you dislike. Make it tight. No adverbs. We’ll start there. You know what they say about a journey of a thousand miles, but as a gesture of goodwill, I’ll take it with you.

The offer stands, if he happens to read this. I doubt the JG would have run it, and ultimately, I suspect Tim thinks he’s really a pretty great writer. You can’t solve a problem until you admit you have one, right?

If you live around here, you know how insane the weather has been this week. Yesterday it was nudging 70 degrees. Today the wind is howling and the temperature is plummeting. It’s 28 as I write this; it was 56 when I worked out at 6 this morning. Do you guys have the wind map bookmarked? You should; it’s a lovely presentation of how the breeze moves across the continental U.S., and on a day like today, especially so.

So, the Michigan primary came out pretty much as expected. The big story today is the declare-uncommitted vote against Biden, which is being spun as danger-Will-Robinson to the president, and perhaps it is, but I doubt it. I heard, before the voting began, that the uncommitted movement was hoping to get 10,000, an absurdly low number. Dearborn is a city of roughly 100,000, more than half of them Arab immigrants or native-born Americans. And it’s only one of several municipalities with significant Arab populations expected to be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Then fold in the young voters of all ethnicities who are appalled by the Gaza war, and you come up with something closer to the actual count last night: 101,436.

Others have pointed out that it’s disingenuous to assume all these voters are Democrats to begin with. Arab Americans around here are socially conservative, and recent culture wars have driven many of them back into the arms of the GOP, which is where they were before the Gulf War(s). There is a significant Dem presence there, but it’s not a solid wall. My hope is that these people decide, in November, that a no-choice vote at the top of the November ticket is one for Trump, and as bad as things are in Gaza now, they will be 10 times worse with Bibi’s buddy back in the White House.

As always, we will see. And P.S. Nikki Haley stole 3x that many votes from you-know-who.

OK, gotta suit up for lifeguarding swimming lessons. I hope the natatorium heat adjusted to the plummeting temperature.

I went to an estate sale this weekend. It was the usual story: An enormous, three-story house stuffed to the rafters with junk that should have been thrown away, given away or sold years ago. A useful lesson in the importance of keeping your stuff lean — you always think, and this is what the family didn’t want — as well as why the amount of stuff you drag through life is directly proportional to the space you have to keep it in. One day I will live in one of those tiny houses, and Kate’s chore upon my death can be carried out in less than a day.

A woman passed me on the staircase: Old, I’d guess 75 or beyond, wearing a coat that had seen better days. The real shocker was her hair, which was a mess, but a deliberate one, with the centerpiece an enormous, teased bump at the crown of her head. Think 1962-era Ronnie Spector, only blonde and bigger. Think ’60s Priscilla Presley, ditto. An egg sac for the biggest spider in the world. And so on. I don’t want to be cruel. I know we’re supposed to be all you go girl about pretty much any presentation of femininity, and I often remind myself that there is no one way to be a woman, that it covers everyone from the butchest lesbian to the most Kardashian-worshiping girlie girl. There was a movie about this out this summer, perhaps you saw it — “Barbie.”

Anyway, I read Dwight Garner’s very positive review of Lucy Sante’s new memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name.” It’s the story of her gender transition, at 66 years old. She was once Luc Sante, who I saw read here in Detroit a few years back:

Second paragraph of Garner’s review:

She can hear what some of you are thinking. She fears that, by coming out as transgender now, she will be thought to be “merely following a trend, maybe to stay relevant.” She worries her transition will be viewed as a timely shucking of male privilege, a suit of armor that has grown heavy and begun to rust, or as a final bohemian pose, or as something more literary to do in semiretirement than sucking on a Werther’s Original.

I plead guilty to thinking many of those things. As someone who has enjoyed Sante’s work for some time — I found Luc when one of his books was used as the basis for “Gangs of New York” — I found myself, as I so often am when confronting this issue, rather baffled. Would Lucy Sante have been able to publish so many interesting books, or would she have been pigeonholed as a women’s writer? Would a transition, say from female to male, be framed as her abandoning or somehow betraying her children? (Sante has an adult son, barely mentioned.) And yeah, nice way to shed one’s male privilege. But mostly I’m thinking why every one of these memoirs has to talk so much about clothing and makeup and jewelry:

Her memoir is moving for many reasons, but primarily for its observations about aging and vanity, as seen through the separated colors of a prismatic lens. She has, in her late 60s, begun to shrink. She has back problems, knee problems and kidney stones. She is told that, because her facial hair has gone gray, she cannot have laser treatments to remove it. These would have been vastly quicker and less expensive than the painful weekly electrolysis she must undergo instead.

The better news is that she gets to go shopping, and she takes us with her. The reader experiences these vividly written scenes as if they were montages from an updated, late-life version of “Legally Blonde” — “Legally Platinum,” perhaps.

I learned that an empire waist on a long torso will make the wearer look pregnant, that shapeless things like sweatshirts only flatter 20-year-old bodies, that flouncy tops require considerable mammary buttressing, that puffy shoulders make me look like a linebacker, that suspiciously cheap clothes are best avoided for both moral and aesthetic reasons, that wanting to look like the model in the picture does not constitute a valid reason for buying the garment.

There is so much more to being female than this bullshit, but then again, it’s also how we identify one another at first glance, so maybe the obsession is understandable. When a twit like Caitlyn Jenner says the hardest thing about being a woman is selecting a nail polish color, half of me thinks it’s a joke and the other half wants to smack her silly face. I don’t see that passage above as a vividly written scene; it’s basically the interior monologue of every woman who looked in her closet this morning. Dwight Garner! Do you know any women?

The a-ha moment rings false:

In early 2021, she found FaceApp, which has a gender-swapping feature. The images, some of which are printed in this book, floored her. “She was me,” Sante writes. “When I saw her I felt something liquefy in the core of my body.” She showed them to her partner of 14 years, who was confused by what Sante was trying to tell her. They ended up parting ways. They were both upset and torn. “It was not so much that I had betrayed Mimi’s trust, but that I had never honestly earned it,” Sante writes.

Nope, sorry, you betrayed her trust, girlfriend. A human being should expect change in a life partner, but not that kind of change. “They ended up parting ways” has to be the understatement of the decade, like it’s Mimi’s fault she couldn’t deal. There are spouses who can easily transition (ha ha) to being best friends or some other variation of it in a situation like this, but you can’t blame the ones who can’t. It’s a big bomb to drop into a relationship. And in my reading to understand gender dysphoria, I’ve read many accounts of men and women who knew, deep in their bones, from their earliest memories, that something was disconnected between their mental and physical selves. This is the first one I’ve read that was brought on by an app.

But! Luc Sante was a great writer, and I’m sure Lucy will be, too, and ultimately it’s her life, not mine. She can live it on her terms. I’ll see her speak the next time she comes through town. I am keeping my mind open.

So. The weekend was nice, though more or less uneventful. We stayed in. (It was cold.) We watched movies. (It was cold.) “Priscilla,” about the aforementioned Priscilla Presley, was strangely blank. It was in large part about Elvis’ interest in his teen girlfriend’s female presentation, and didn’t explicitly call it grooming, although it obviously was. I didn’t like it as much as most critics did, but the acting of Cailee Spaeny in the title role was very good, spanning the main character from 14 to her late 20s.

I also watched the original “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” a great memory of old New York and of the way movies that take place in cities always used to have the full spectrum of ethnic types found there. So the hijacked subway train features an old Jew, a woman who speaks only Spanish, a cool black dude, etc. But it was fun to watch, getting in and out in about 90 minutes. That’s pro filmmaking.

With that, I’m drawing the curtain on my sedate life and turning my attention to making spaghetti. Monday awaits.