50 cents

I grew up a long time ago, in a forgotten age, when mothers stayed home with their children and kept house and fathers worked Monday thru Friday and were home in time for dinner. Mothers would prepare ingredients and make a meal and the entire family would sit down and eat together, discuss the day’s events and sometimes even share a freshly baked dessert together afterwards. “When was that?” you ask? Just before the Civil War.
On the weekend my father would start his day with a cup of coffee (decaf, little sugar, little half and half) and the news paper. I would sit and have my breakfast, feet dangling six inches above the floor, and watch and listen. He would read each page, carefully folding the paper in half at every turn of the page, and scoff and “humph”, and “huh” at seemingly every article. I did not understand it then, but his disapproval of the paper’s contents was glaringly obvious. Occasionally the paper he referred to as the “Times Useless” would include an editorial by George Will or Thomas Sowell and my father would have me read it and then explain it’s contents to him. I think it was an exercise in comprehension, but even then he didn’t want me influenced by the left wing of the OP ED universe.
As a grown man I have grown disgusted with newspapers, antiquated disasters of omissions and poorly thought out opinions passed off as fact, chock full of editors’ mistakes and amateur writing ... they are essentially useless. People who hunger for news have wandered from the printed daily and found elsewhere what they were searching for. Their sins are too numerous to list. An 80 word story on page 8 briefly telling that a soldier shot and killed a pregnant woman, in her own home, through a picture window, in broad daylight. Upon his acquittal of all charges a full half front page, above the fold, detailing a riot in the same town. No mention of the cause, no mention of the dead woman and baby, no mention of the murderer set free. The New York Times once published a daily 2 page fluff piece of hero worship for Laurent Kabila, heralding his great civil war in Zaire ... somehow while praising “the great hope for Africa” they forgot to include anything about his lifelong ambition to create a Marxist dictatorship, they failed to mention the atrocities his soldiers committed along their bloody march to the capital, no one felt it necessary to include anything about the American corporation financing the whole thing in exchange for mineral rights ... just “rah-rah Democratic Republic of the Congo” which, once founded was neither democratic nor a republic. And after it was all said and done, after Kabila had become the very dictator he replaced, no apology, no retraction ... and utterly no credibility. I can keep going. I won’t.
I still buy the paper ... I sit and read it, often in front of my kids while drinking coffee (caffeinated, black) I scoff at its contents and laugh at the obvious disaster that it has become. Why do I bother? It comes to this, there is no smell in the world like the mental time machine inducing odor that wafts from a newly opened newspaper. That smell instantly transports me 22 years and 800 miles to my father’s lap, trying to understand George Will’s analysis of the Berlin Wall coming down. Through all the obvious lies and through every editor’s attempt to misinform, through all the tragic writing that passes for journalism, there are only 2 smells in the world that transform me into a contented 10 year old being taught life by one of the grandest fathers there ever was, newspaper and saw dust. It’s a stroll down memory lane that is well worth the price of admission, so the Tampa Tribune can have my scorn ... and my 50 cents.