Dennis,

What would you say you do there, (the Strib?)

I’m really looking forward to you insight concerning the GOP convention.

You do know it begins today, right?

As long as we are sticking with the Obama theme, I’ll send you a couple of excerpts from his literary collection.

From Dreams of My Father: ‘I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.’

From Dreams of My Father: ‘I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s race.’

From Dreams of My Father: ‘There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.’

From Dreams of My Father: ; ‘It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.’

From Dreams of My Father: ‘I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, Dubois and Mandela.’

From Audacity of Hope: ‘I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.’

Last update: May 28, 2008 - 1:07 AM

If he cannot keep track of his own tax liabilities, how can he be qualified to be a senator? Obviously, NOT.

Considering this guy for public office, is a no brainer. Franken should go back to comedy.

So, let me explain by looking at why papers will not be around in 10 years, papers other than USA today…

With the public craving flashy visuals over lifeless print, newspapers everywhere are scrambling to increase or not further lose readership in order to retain their advertisers, the life blood of any private media outlet. Looking at the Star as just one example of this reveals a scramble at the top with editors and staff being shuffled like substitutions in a T-ball game in order to come up with the hottest team. And perhaps nowhere is the effort to hook and hold the public more pronounced than in the evolution of the opinion pages, those pages traditionally read least in any paper by this once literate culture now on the decline. Where once these pages were filled with rich, varied and complex insight, now the printed word bursts, kept deliberately short for easier consumption, seem dummied down in an attempt to attract the “American Idol” crowd who by their numbers, it is hoped, will continue to attract advertisers searching for the best return on their funds. So, as it stands now, at least to a person who does read these pages, one third of the letters printed on any given day seem to be truly excellent, one third are not nearly as good yet have simply made the cut on that particular day, and one third seem to be nothing more than short paragraphs meant to fill out the page, palatable stuff, easily read, not very taxing.

Possibly as a reaction to these intense economic stressors, the once prized opinion pages now seem to be staffed by those far different to those I’ve known in similar positions in smaller, free or college papers. I realize this comparison is not fair by any means, since these smaller papers need not to the same degree appease or represent the publisher’s or advertiser’s interests. Nonetheless, I feel something more interesting and revealing is at work here. That is, having worked both on college and small ad supported private papers and also after that often as a therapist in years gone by, I sensed a quite uncomfortable atmosphere in some of the offices, often but not always, where many staffers seemed edgy when having to directly deal with the public in any personal sense, seeing that public as threatening in some way. I’ll try to explain this later. For now, let me say while working with a variety of positions and people, white or blue collar, I have rarely seen a similar kind of fear or uncertainty concerning the evaluation of their jobs, and an insecurity, as I saw it as when dealing with newspaper staff. I talked at many times with my co-workers and feel this fear or uncertainty stems directly from a rarely discussed suspicion that virtually any educated and relatively intellectual person could do their job. This leads to an observation I have long held, that because of this high paced anxiety, such workers, to protect themselves from what they see as outside or administrative threats, armor themselves with long memories and even thinner skins, and by never forgetting any slight, real or imagined. I do believe this they know already.

This is not to say that it is easy to sift and winnow through so many bad and good letters per day. It is only to say, from the perspective of someone who has done these letter evaluations on smaller papers, that it is not all that difficult either. So, one way that large papers such as the Star deal with the suffocating influx of letters is to insist writers submit their letters in what psychologists call a concrete specific which is quite a paradox for a paper that wants to maintain readership to insist on this quite boring style. Yet, this insistence on such a small number of easily digested concrete word whines is made more the farce by ed. columnists who in their own works turn around and write in a far more interesting abstract random style, the style in which actual human beings do communicate.

So, what happens to insulated editorial or letters staff people who find comfort and anonymity huddling incestuously from the real world storms in their concrete halls ? Easy. What happens to a dog crossing the path of any harried, overworked person particularly he or she who feels others with fresher talents may someday steal away their grandfathered job ? What happens to that dog? Simple. He gets the boot. Gets the boot from those younger and brighter than he. Meaning, of course, you can fool a fool, any of Obama’s armies that is, but there are many other who saw what the Star did, and personally I would lament it’s demise. Not now…