As I get back into this web log, after five weeks in China, I want to think out loud about it for a bit.
I don’t suppose there are many readers left after that big hiatus, but
I will persist in the hope of opening a conversation with a new audience. (Also, because writing here is therapeutic – expressing my horror at contemporary society makes it less likely that I will pick up an AK-47 and spray innocent bystanders with deadly fire.)
I suspect that I will spend less time on politics from here on in and more on
communication. (I almost wrote "journalism," but that trade has fallen on hard times and there’s not a lot of it to address.)
Where I do write about politics, I hope to make the connections that broadcasting and most newspapers and magazines fail to note.
Of course, I will continue to post my monthly Albuquerque Tribune columns here once they are published in the newspaper. Happily, the Tribune has moved it to the Insight and Opinion section and freed me from the "New Wrinkles in Aging" rubric. I will write on diverse topics.
The next column, which I emailed from China a few weeks ago, appears tomorrow. (Absent some emergency, they will all run the fourth Thursday of the month.)
Which reminds me - may I urge you to read the Tribune regularly?
As a friend reminded me the other day, the Tribune is the Albuquerque Publishing Company’s Cinderella. It is true that, the business merger linking the papers guarantees the Tribune’s existence. But the merged advertising and distribution departments favor the Journal.
This is not only unfair, but deprives citizens of the some top-notch reading. Tribune syndicated columnists, for example, include Ivins, Safire, Krugman and Will. I selected two liberal and two conservatives to make the point that the Tribune stable is balanced; as you know, the Journal’s Op Ed choices tilt far to the right. It’s also true that Ivins and Krugman write well and are strong advocates. The Journal’s "liberal" writers are less proficient and most of them are sissies.
As we go along, please let me know what you think of what I think. Thank you.