By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
How can one describe appropriately the act of sitting down to read – if that’s even the proper term for the experience – the New York Post and Daily News, the two remaining big city tabloids in America’s biggest city? I am tempted toward the kind of hyperbole one finds in their pages. Reading the Post/News, I imagine, is like getting your head bashed in by a half-naked drunk on a corner who then apologizes by rubbing the sports section on your belly. It’s like having rats run up your leg to whisper in your ear that the cheese on Page 6 is all the truth ye need to know. It’s like finding a pubic hair in your teeth only to be told, “That’s dinner. Enjoy.” One feels that brain cells have been lost after only a few minutes with the tabloids, that the scope of reality has been reduced to a pinhead somewhere in a pile of New York hay (good luck finding it), that one has entered a funhouse of comic book casuistry where good and evil vie in the best-accoutered spandex for control – the world of the purely reductionist, the world of the line-toeing moral pedant drill sergeant who is at once willfully stupid, resentfully petty, painfully gimmicky, groaningly hamfisted, who tosses anvils from skyscrapers to kill a fly…while at the same time a voice, loud and strong and god-like, announces: “Dear reader, whatever prejudice and misconception you already have about government, Wall Street, the economy, education, race, religion, and your bad health, we will confirm. Just buy the paper!” The tabloids offer a wondrous kind of “news” in that one almost always feels less informed as a result of their reporting, truth per usual being hostage to the braying of headlines and the battle for circulation and the art of reducing complexity, nuance, ambiguity, contradiction – reality! – to column-inches that can be clutched in a child’s hand and are forgotten a day later. (The news never stops – except to drive out truth with the harpies of the “deadline”.)
So, for example, we have the primal scream, the ape-like pounding of chest and head, over the decision by the Obama Administration last Friday to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators in Manhattan federal court. The bloodlust of the past week in the Post and the News, taken as artifice and political propaganda, has something leadenly Al Qaeda-like about it in the execution but shows none of the mastery of the language. Osama bin Laden is in fact a mite bit smarter in his message: At least he has the courtesy to explain, in clear and precise words, that the Islamists have good reason to hate the United States government because of its endless meddling in the Middle East. (Such a long list: an embargo that kills half-a-million Iraqi children in the 1990s; invasion and occupation that chalks up an Iraqi death toll now approaching 700,000; the persistent blind-mole blowjobbery via bombs and ammo and aircraft handed over to the Israeli hegemon to keep Palestinians in concentration camps and ensure a regional arms race; the propping up of the oil-deranged criminal caliphates and fat-necked strongmen who would rather their good citizens, along with the Palestinians, be washed down the Nile in a flood of feces…the list running on and on.)
One can only imagine what the proud parochial minds at the Post/News would make of Islamic troops stomping around Brooklyn harassing our women and children, looking up their skirts for bombs and other things, or, worse, interrupting with small-arms fire the dinner hour at Elaine’s. The chief concern of the tabloids is that the 9/11 defendants, after they are slapped down with the guilty verdict about which we are so happily certain, might not be sent to death. If sentenced to death, the further worry is they might not get the full tickertape stoning on Broadway before heading to Golgotha and the deliciousness of crucifixion. As both the Daily News and Post report, presumably citing knowledgeable sources, the 9/11 conspirators are going “straight to hell.” (Nota bene: God, hell, heaven, satan, evil, evil and evil – these make an everyday appearance as editorial compass points at the tabloids, in a witchy redneck amalgam of Irish/Italian Catholic brimstone, with Jewish resentment thrown into the mix over Israel’s not being declared greatest country ever, forever.)
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