Are newspapers really dying ...

... or is it murder?

I don't read Time magazine anymore, but a friend sent me an article that coincided with the folding of the Rocky Mountain News, listing 10 other major papers that were in danger of folding before the end of the year.

It didn't surprise me that there were papers in trouble, but I was shocked by at least a few of the ones on the list. The Boston Globe, for instance. The Globe is one of the finest papers in the country, but it's reportedly losing $1 million a month.

The Miami Herald, for another, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Both are the dominant papers in their market and have been for a long time. When I see papers like that in trouble, I really find myself wondering if journalism has a future.

It doesn't help that most papers now aren't owned or run by news people. Big companies looking for big profits scarfed up a lot of papers in good times, when profit margins were running 25-30 percent.

Now that profits are down, and in some places gone completely, there's no sense of mission to keep them going. A newspaper losing money is just like a department store losing money to these people -- something to be sold or closed.

The San Francisco Chronicle, another disappearing newspaper, was the flagship of the Hearst empire for the better part of a century. I would have loved to have worked there; it was one of my dream destinations.

Now of course some will say that print media itself is obsolete, that with the Internet we really don't have to kill all these trees. Yes, I can read the news on my BlackBerry. It isn't the same, though, and they'll never be able to monetize the Internet as effectively as they did when they sold copies of papers. There are just too many people who believe with all their hearts that content on the 'net should be free.

So they'll survive in Web editions with much less revenue, which means fewer reporters and less investigative work. Fewer malefactors and miscreants will be exposed, and those who work in the shadows will have a much easier time of it.

I've said for several years that newspapers should not be operated as for-profit businesses anyway. Their constitutional protection via the First Amendment makes them far too important. Maybe it's time we got serious about finding a way to save newspapers before they're all gone.

Time for America to grow up a little

Why is it I have a feeling that if our Founding Fathers were to look at us, they would laugh?

Or worse, be ashamed of us.

We have become a country where the loudest voices tell the biggest lies, where much of our effort goes to protecting the wealthiest of us.

We have reached a point where something like one of every seven working people is either unemployed or underemployed, yet efforts to help them in any other way than discredited trickle-down economics is decried as "socialism."

Indeed, if you listen to the loudest of their voices, socialism morphs without difficulty into "communism" and "Marxism," as if the discredited, long-dead commissars of the old Soviet Union were running America.

Well, pardon me, but that is such a load of crap.

Economically, the middle class in this country is no better off than it was in 1972, when far more families lived on only one income. Individual debt is staggeringly high; too many people have bought into the "he who dies with the most toys wins" philosophy. Got a 37-inch HD-television? Hey, look at this 52-incher.

Meanwhile, one of every eight homeowners is either in foreclosure or more than a month behind on mortgage payments. Of course, we're more concerned about whether gays are allowed to get married.

And if you think this downturn in the economy will somehow even things out, don't kid yourself. During the Great Depression, the rich got a lot richer, picking up distressed properties for 10 cents on the dollar.

Ever since Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the share of America's wealth controlled by the top 1 percent has increased. We're now at the point where 1 percent of our people control about 25 percent of money, property. etc.

Meanwhile, the "American Dream" of upward mobility, that any boy or girl can become rich through intelligence and hard work, has become almost impossible for many. George Carlin put it best when he said, "They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

Well, I think we could do with a little more socialism in this country. For all the right wing says about European socialism being a failure because their economies are 30 percent less productive, well, so what?

I think if you asked people in this country if they would be willing to have significantly higher taxes in return for guaranteed health care, free education for their children through college and an assured retirement, you might be surprised how many would say yes.

We are on the verge of a massive disaster in this country, the likes of which we have never seen. The Baby Boomer generation is approaching retirement, and it's a good bet that something like 70 percent are totally unprepared. Remember, most Baby Boomers will not have pensions. All they'll have is Social Security and whatever they've managed to save.

Quite a few of us have been counting on selling our houses for big profits to finance our golden years, but housing prices have plummeted the last two years.

What you're going to see is older workers staying on past 65 -- if they can.

The American Dream?

It's time to start creating a new American Reality, something we can do by shutting off talk radio and the screamers and realizing that we may not know the guy next door, but we are all in this together.

We need a little less Calvinism and a little more Socialism.

I'm beginning to understand how Ochs felt

Phil Ochs was one of the great singer/songwriters of the mid 20th century, a man who believed that his songs ought to say something and mean something.

He was a folksinger, seen by some as the poor man's Bob Dylan, and he killed himself at the age of 35 because he could no longer sing. I saw him at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C., a couple of years before his death, and it was one of the most memorable nights of my life.

His voice was awful; he had been strangled in Tanzania in 1972, damaging his vocal cords. He growled out most of his songs, but the audience was packed with people who loved him and we kept calling him back for encore after encore.

I think it was 1974 when I saw him. I would have been 24, still filled with the enthusiasm of someone who thought he could get it together and really accomplish something. Believe me, it took enthusiasm. I had flunked out of college three times by that age and I was working the graveyard shift at a fast food restaurant.

I'll be 60 this year, and there are a lot of times I feel I've lived too long. For all intents and purposes, my career in journalism ended 14 months ago, when a corporate flunky with a Napoleon complex set me up and fired me. Since then I've been working on a book, but the closer I get to finishing it the more I wonder if it will ever be finished.

It's a look back, of course. I always find myself looking back.

I always find myself wondering what might have happened if I hadn't fucked up my life when I was young.

I'll never kill myself. It's too hostile an act, and there are too many people who love me and would be badly hurt by it. But I find myself sympathizing with Ochs, and understanding why he did what he did.

I set this site up to update it frequently, but I have been doing a horrible job of that lately. I suppose I'm depressed, suffering from empty-nest syndrome. The only thing in my life I ever did really well was be a father, and my two children are grown and gone. These days I stumble around trying to be a good husband and pretending I'm not counting the days till ...

Well, till whatever.

Something has got to change.

It's important to have people to depend on

In an otherwise forgettable Robin Williams movie called "What Dreams May Come," there is a wonderful scene.

Williams and his teenage son are talking, and his son is upset that he isn't living up to his dad's expectations. Williams tells the boy how proud he is of him, and then tells him that if he ever had to storm the gates of hell, his son is the first person he would want at his side.

At the time he never expected he would actually have to go into hell to rescue his beloved wife, but the metaphor is understandable. When things are at their worst, who would you want at your side?

I would have some pretty good choices, but at the top of my list I would put my son. He is a good kid, a high achiever and he really cares about doing things the right way. When he was a freshman in college, one of his roommates came to me and said something that totally blew me away.

He said, "Virgile is the nicest person I have ever met in my entire life."

Now I know the kid who said this was 18 at the time, hardly looking back on a long life, and I know he and my son had a falling out a couple of years later.

Still, wow.

Second on my list would be my younger brother. Stephen is 10 years younger than I am, and he is the man I wish I was in many ways. The work he put in the last seven or eight years helping to care for our father, and the time he has spent since last March taking care of our mother, has done so much to show his unselfishness.

Virgile and Stephen have one thing in common. If you ask them to do something, it gets done.

Sounds simple, but think of all the people you know who don't come through.

Then look for people in your own lives that if you had nowhere else to turn, you could turn to them for help -- and get it.

I am a lucky man.

In this winter of our discontent ...

In early 1993, in the first days of the Clinton administration, the president proposed an economic plan to deal with the recession and the deficit.

Bill Clinton's plan included a tax increase, and it passed the House of Representatives without a single Republican vote. In fact, such notables as Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey (two of the great names, remember them?) said the plan would be an economic disaster and Republicans wanted Democrats to own it completely.

Of course Clinton was happy to own it. His plan helped bring on seven years of prosperity.

When I remember that, it always fascinates me that the Republican Party's symbol is the elephant, which reportedly never forgets. You see, these Republicans forget everything.

These Republicans are pretty close to being blithering idiots.

They did it again. President Obama's stimulus plan passed the House with zero Republican votes, and it got through the Senate with only three votes from Northeastern GOP senators.

They want Obama to own his plan, which they say will be a disaster for the U.S. economy.

Well, if these helmetheads were more than half-bright, they would all have voted for the plan on final passage after negotiating the best deal they could get. That way, if it succeeded they could claim part of the credit and if it failed, they could shrug their shoulders and say it would have passed anyway.


Instead, we have Fat Man and Little Boy -- Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity -- both blathering three hours a day to their radio audiences that they want the plan to fail.

Forgive me if this sounds a little harsh, but think about it. That makes them traitors to the American people.

Editor's note: Mike, you can't call them traitors. It's a political disagreement.

Actually, it's not. The politics are over and the stimulus plan is policy now. When FM and LB say they want it to fail, it's so the voting public will reject Obama in 2012 and elect Caribou Barbie or some other Republican.

Meanwhile, of course, an economy that has been collapsing for six months will have to collapse for another four years, bringing massive pain to millions of American families.


So when Hannity and Limbaugh root for it to fail, they're rooting for the economy to get even worse. Imagine how much smarter they would have been if either of them had said this:

"I hate what the stimulus plan includes, and I honestly don't believe it is good for America or that it will work. But I would be happy to be proved wrong, because these are desperate times for many families."

Of course for that to happen, they would have to be more than total partisans. They don't care who suffers as long as the Democrats don't succeed.

I think it's time to flush Rush and tell Sean begone.

Memories of one who is no longer around

Today is my dad's birthday.

We won't be celebrating it, because my dad passed away last March and we buried him in a lovely ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. He lived 82 years and change, and this would have been his 83rd birthday.

I didn't see him much during the 20 years I lived on the West Coast -- home for a few Christmases, that sort of thing -- and we didn't spend as much time talking on the phone as we could have. It's funny that we almost always regret these things when it's too late to do any good, although I suppose the people who are still around benefit a little from our newly acquired resolve.

My dad was a good man, a fine man who cared more about his family than anything else. He traveled for work all through my high school years -- four times a year, three or four weeks each time -- and the thing I remember more than anything else about those trips is that every day, six postcards came in the mail.

One for my mother and one for each of the five children, just letting us know that no matter where he was, we were in his thoughts and in his heart.

It took me a long time to appreciate him. I spent too many years at war with him, a war that only I was fighting and in which I was the only casualty.

I was a gifted child, and in those days of the late '50s, parents never knew whether to push a gifted child or allow him to proceed at his own speed. My parents pushed me, and there came a point at which I started pushing back. I have no idea why, and I still have control issues that sometimes drive my lovely wife up the wall.

But it was my dad who gave me my love of family and my love of baseball, two of the most important things in my life. He was the one who taught me that you never stand so tall as when you are putting other people first.

I've been told by people, including my own kids, that I have been a great father. Most of what I know, I learned from him. I took the thing he did that worked and used them, and the things that didn't work and abandoned them.

That made it easy.

It also made it easy that my two kids were wonderful from the start. In other words, I didn't have to raise me.

All told, I think my father was a great man and I miss him a lot.

Happy birthday, dad.

Forwarded e-mails ... what a thrill

I have a friend who is always sending me political stuff over the Internet.

He usually adds a comment -- something like "You'll agree with this" or "This guy has a point" -- and then I read it to find something equivalent to Hitler's Final Solution but without the ovens.

My friend -- let's call him "Mitch" so as not to embarrass him -- has always been in something of a weird place politically. On some issues, he's to the right of Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, while on others he's to the left of Karl Marx. For the longest time, he called himself a libertarian, but he wasn't one really because he couldn't do the laissez faire on the behavior issues.

I think I shamed him out of that anyway. I despise the libertarian philosophy, mostly because I think two different four-word slogans -- choose the one you like best -- sum it up perfectly.

"I've got mine, Jack."

"Every man for himself."

Most of the political stuff circulating on the Internet is crap anyway. It's either lies or material recycled for decades. "Mitch" sent me one about the sins of Ted Kennedy, saying "I know you're no fan of his."

The stuff in that e-mail was almost all stuff from 40 or 50 years ago -- he cheated on an exam in college, he drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick, etc. But the man is nearly 77 years old now and he's dying of a brain tumor. I think the Christian thing to do is lay off the Chappaquiddick stuff.

My friend may not realize is, but when he passes stuff like that along -- or the thing he sent me today basically saying only Republicans pay taxes -- all he's doing is contributing to the poisonous atmosphere in this country. If we ever do split into the United States of Canada and Jesusland, it'll be because of stuff like this.

I'm just tired of it. I told my friend he shouldn't do it anymore, and his response to me was basically, "Tough shit."

I get back at him, though.

I send him JPEGs of Britney Spears' genitals.