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All the News That Doesn't FitOctober 14, 2005 Nothing like a time crunch to make you reassess your priorities. Did I say I had too much work? Yeah, even Rhodry's sick of hearing about it. Thanks to the weather, I've cut back on riding -- well, OK, I did go for an hour-and-a-half trail ride late yesterday afternoon, arriving back at the barn after the sun (wherever it was -- remember the sun?) went down, but still . . . I've even cut back on FreeCell, Rat Poker, and Tetris. What I've had a really hard time cutting back on is AlterNet. I've been reading it for less than a year: I signed up on a colleague's recommendation after last year's U.S. presidential election because I was so totally blown away by the apocalyptic gloom-and-dooming of so many of my liberal and progressive acquaintances. All this because Kerry lost? Were they kidding? I live in Massachusetts. I don't think much of Mr. Kerry. More to the point, I voted for Mr. Clinton in 1992 and (I'm afraid, though I'm not sure) in 1996. He was the first winner I'd ever voted for (my first presidential election was 1972), and the whole eight years pretty much cured me of the popular concept of voting for the least disgusting candidate. Anyway, I got curious: why were these otherwise intelligent liberals and progressives so screwed up? There's plenty of good stuff on AlterNet. Molly Ivins, for one. I've gained considerable insight into liberal/progressive angst, and been shocked by how totally absent the red-blooded grassroots feminism of the 1970s and 1980s is from liberal-progressive discourse -- if, of course, AlterNet is representative of the U.S. left-of-center. Mostly absent is any analysis of the Current Situation that gets beyond "Smash the Right! Defeat the Running Dogs of Christianity!" There are, however, some thoughtful, articulate people who post comments to the various threads. (In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I'm one of them, and I'll tell you my pen name if you ask politely and promise not to pass it on.) And there's the rub: it's not the reading that takes up so much time; it's the responding. And I can no more read without responding than I can lurk in an e-mail forum or shut up in a meeting if someone says something stupid. I stopped reading a daily newspaper in 1983, or thereabouts -- when the Washington Star went out of business. That's what I was reading, and I didn't have the heart to go back to the Pest, as D.C.'s other major paper was known. I'd already been a daily newspaper junkie for more than two decades, having started precociously at the age of about nine. It was time for a break. The breaking wasn't hard: neither D.C. paper covered the city I lived in -- it was all about the gummint -- and when I moved to Martha's Vineyard, it was just about impossible to find anything intelligent about Martha's Vineyard in the Boston or Cape Cod papers. (The search for signs of intelligent life in the Martha's Vineyard Times and the Vineyard Gazette is often unsuccessful, but at least I recognize most of the names.) Anyway, reading AlterNet I reverted to my news junkie days -- you know, being desperately afraid that if I didn't read everything, I'd miss something important, and if I didn't respond, then no one else would understand the fallacy or the omissions in some columnist's argument. A couple of days into the Autumn of Overwork, I'm doing better. SKIM and DELETE have been added to my repertoire. If a response takes more than five minutes, I abort and go back to work. I don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and I don't need any news media to tell me when I wake up that the world hasn't blown up overnight. John Gorka's song about New Jersey just popped into my head: "If the world ended today, I would adjust."
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