PART ONE
1.
Meechy Blake. The Name America Trusts.
That’s me. Used to be, anyway. I’ve still got my name, if not the moniker you once saw emblazoned on public buses that crisscrossed city boulevards.
No, I never did anything wrong. I didn’t plagiarize. I did not misreport. I never did fake news, which nobody even heard of back then. I never sexually harassed a co-employee. Okay, maybe the occasional flirtation or Christmas kiss beneath mistletoe, tame by today’s progressive standards.
I got eased out. Early retirement. Seemed like a good deal at the time. A golden handshake and enticing pension. But after a few years pass you realize that by trading your job for severance you made a mistake, got screwed; that opting out is never a good deal at all but just an end to your career, your relevancy—eventually, your life.
I wrote a twice weekly column in a respectable big city newspaper. Everyone around town knew my name, if only from seeing it on buses. They welcomed me into their establishments and would have plied me with free food and drink if I hadn’t turned it down on principle. (I could never be bought, would not even accept a donut.)
When corporate terminated my column, they took my identity too—a perch to which I’d aspired for decades while climbing the ladder from intern to cub reporter to City Desk to news editor to foreign correspondent to foreign editor and finally my own column. A meritocratic system that ultimately merited me into forced retirement.
Because without realizing it, I made myself, as a columnist, one of the easiest jobs in the newspaper business to cut (America’s trust in Meechy Blake notwithstanding).
Used to be, a big city newspaper could syndicate a column to a hundred independent newspapers around the country, make it pay for itself and then some. But that was before smaller city papers started to shrink in size or close up altogether. And with internet news services and so-called zines and blogs popping up everywhere, well… now everyone’s a journalist.
Which means America goes from being well informed to over informed—and no one’s sure who to trust anymore. Yet one thing they should know and care about, but don’t, is that mainstream media has been conglomerated. This means it is controlled by large corporations and hedge funds that exert control in subtle ways the masses never notice.
As for me, after I accepted that golden shake I became just another freelance reporter (freelance being a euphemism for unemployed) in a changing world where a new generation of reporters publish on news sites just for exposure, no pay. They earn their keep doing other jobs. Which begs the question: How can such “reporters” be trusted when they need money from somewhere else to pay their bills?
It should not matter to me. I should be living the good life in a valley of wine, the Russian River on one side, Napa on the other.
Problem is, they forgot to give me a full blood transfusion when I left when my old newspaper—meaning that my veins still run with ink because that’s how I was born. Soon enough, a cushiony financial “package” dissipates due to inflation and ever-rising revenues to support a government that wants its citizens entirely dependent upon its existence. In other words, capitalism for the very rich, socialism and servitude for everyone else.
Henceforth, Happenstance will appear every Wednesday as a gift to paid subscribers.