My colleague Hank Stuever loaned me Richard Rodriguez's essay collection "Darling." I'm glad he did. The whole thing is excerptable, which means the whole thing is dang good, so read it. Below is one passage from a 2009 piece called "Final Edition" that laments the death of newspapers (I know, I know) and finds God's architecture in a paperboy's route. Though Rodriguez is guilty of tweaking a pet peeve of mine — conflating Washington the city of people and Washington the political morass — he somehow makes curmudgeonliness and antiquarianism seem vanguard and, more importantly, correct.
Something funny I have noticed — perhaps you have noticed it, too. You know what futurists and online-ists and cut-out-the-middle-man-ists and Davos-ists and deconstructionists of every stripe want for themselves? They want exactly what they tell you you no longer need, you pathetic, overweight, disembodied Kindle reader. They want white linen tablecloths on trestle tables in the middle of vineyards on soft blowy afternoons. (You can click your bottle of wine online. Cheaper.) They want to go shopping on Saturday afternoons on the Avenue Victor Hugo; they want the pages of their New York Times all kind of greasy from croissant crumbs and butter at a café table in Aspen; they want to see their names in hard copy in the "New Establishment" issue of Vanity Fair; they want a nineteenth-century bookshop; they want to see the plays in London; they want to float down the Nile in a felucca; they want five-star bricks and mortar and Do Not Disturb signs and views of the park. And in order to reserve these things for themselves they will plug up your eyes and your ears and your mouth, and if they can figure out a way to pump episodes of "The Simpsons" through the darkening corridors of your brain as you expire (ADD TO SHOPPING CART), they will do it.
We will end up with one and a half cities in America. Washington, D.C., and "American Idol." We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing debate between "conservatives" and "progressives." We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses ("Moby Dick" is "not a really good piece of fiction" — Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, IL, USA — two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry.
National newspapers will try to impersonate local newspapers that are dying or dead. (The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal publish San Francisco editions.) We live in the America of USA Today, which appears, unsolicited, in a plastic chrysalis suspended from your doorknob at the Nebraska Holiday Inn or the Maine Marriott. We check the airport weather. We fly from one CNN Headline News monitor to another. We end up where we started.
An obituary does not propose a solution.