Stopping by the Round Robin Bar on my way home, thinking to partake of that single, classy tipple that would, with the help of a few salty snacks, provide a nice buzz but still keep me below 0.08, I witnessed Minot, so deep in his cups that the sight put me off drinking for the remainder of the evening. Ordering a club soda, I pulled up a chair next to him where he sat, alone at a table, looking as miserable as I have ever seen a newspaper reporter.
“Oh, it’s you, Collins,” Minot slurred, blinking at me through a cloud of various spirits, all of which I could readily smell on his breath. “Yeah, it’s Tom Collins, a real live blogger. How [expletive] appropriate! Pull up a chair and watch another Washington Post reporter drink himself to death.”
“Glad to,” I cheerfully responded. “But don’t you ink-stained wretches usually get polluted over at the K Street Lounge, the Lotus, DC Coast, Tattoo Bar or some other watering hole closer to the Post newsroom?”
“Usually,” Minot conceded, “we do. But what with people like you ruining the journalism racket these days, my regular drinking buddies are not so much fun to be around. And tonight was worse than ever. All of them – crying in their beer like babies. I couldn’t take it, so I caught a cab over here to the Willard, where figure I can get thoroughly snockered without listening to them going on and on about Katharine Weymouth turning the paper that toppled Richard Nixon into a [expletive] whore house!”
“You’re referring,” I ventured, “to the recent ‘salon’ debacle?”
“What else?” Minot drained his glass of Canadian Club, gesturing to the waitress for a refill. “Damn good thing Sarah Palin got a wild bug up her [expletive] and decided to resign the governorship of Alaska, and the North Koreans decided to start a cyber war, because otherwise, Kathy’s little plan for twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-plate soirées with corporate fat cats, lobbyists, Obama Administration insiders and… us! Yeah, us – Washington Post reporters! That would all still be on the front pages in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles – not to mention all over the rest of the [expletive] world!”
“No doubt about it,” I agreed, “one certainly has to wonder what Washington Post top management was thinking.”
“Thinking?” Minot roared with laughter. “What the [expletive] do you think they were thinking? They were thinking about how to keep their newspaper from going bankrupt in a world where – thanks to the likes of you and your ilk – nobody under thirty even reads [expletive] newspapers anymore!”
“Well,” I suggested, “you have to admit, getting your news, analysis and opinion in electronic form from the World Wide Web and wireless networking is faster, more immediate, more diverse, more dynamic, and much less expensive than subscribing to a service whose business model was invented in the eighteenth century. I mean, really, Minot, you folks in the newspaper business must have realized that somehow, someday, something would come along that rendered newspapers totally obsolete. Come to think of it, I’d say you were pretty damn lucky that radio and television didn’t put you all out of business decades before Al Gore even invented the Internet.”
“[Expletive] it, Collins!” Minot exclaimed in an utterly despondent tone. “I got into Columbia University! That’s a genuine Ivy League school, you know, not some faux-Ivy crap like Johns Hopkins or Stanford! Columbia’s the real deal – Cornell, Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Penn, Yale, Dartmouth and Columbia! Nobody held a [expletive] gun to my head and made me major in journalism, you know! I wanted to be a newspaper reporter for the Washington Post, more than anything!” He leaned closer, confessing through a gale of alcohol. “You know how many times I watched ‘All the President’s Men’ in my basement rec room when I was a teenager? Sixteen times, Collins. Sixteen! When I was twenty, I tell you, Collins, I [expletive] worshipped Woodward and Bernstein!”
“That was,” I acknowledged, “one very good movie.”
“Good?” Minot snorted. “Ha! It was [expletive] inspiring, Collins, that’s what [expletive] ‘All the President’s Men’ was! It [expletive] inspired me to spend four years and a [expletive] load of money getting a [expletive] journalism diploma at a prestigious university where I could have gotten a degree in anything – anything at all! And now, nobody gives a flying [expletive] about newspaper journalists anymore, and newspapers are dropping like flies swatted by giant, hairy trolls wielding, ah, uh, um…”
“Giant, rolled-up newspapers?” I interjected.
“Very funny,” Minot scowled. “But good point, Collins, I’ll give you that, at least. Yeah, [expletive]-A. How the [expletive] are these kids who won’t subscribe to their local newspapers going to swat flies? Or wrap fish?”
“Or line their bird cages?” I helpfully elaborated.
“Or pack their glass and china when they move?” Minot continued. “Or start a decent fire in the fireplace?”
“For sure,” I shot back. “My father, he showed me how to use a piece of full-sized newspaper sheet to clear the fireplace flue and get the draft going. You take the front page from last week’s Sunday New York Times and touch a match to it, then hold that sucker right up over that pile of logs and kindling you’ve set up in the fireplace and listen to the draft roar right up the chimney, knocking all that cold air right out. Why, getting a fire started in the fireplace after you’ve done that is a dead cinch! And what’s more, if you don’t do it, then the whole room fills up with smoke before the fire you’ve started manages to knock the cold air out of the chimney. So that’s what those little whipper-snappers who get their news, analysis and opinion from their PC and their Mac and their Blackberry and their iPhone have to look forward to – smoke-filled living rooms every Thanksgiving and Christmas!”
“Exactly,” Minot nodded with obvious approval. “And then there are all the other things newspapers are good for!”
“Actually,” I pointed out in my most tactful tone of voice, “besides reading them, there’s not very much else newspapers are good for.”
“Papier-mâché,” Minot protested. “Like, all those huge dummies and puppets you see at the G8 demonstrations – the protesters make all of them out of old newspapers. Bush, Blair, Chirac…”
“Look who you’re talking about,” I gently chided. “Yesterday’s news. Let’s face it: nobody’s going to subscribe to the Washington Post so they can have enough papier-mâché to make giant, bobbleheaded Joe Biden puppets for the next big political protest.”
“Coupons?” Minot’s face took on a momentarily hopeful aspect.
“No,” I advised, “not really. You can print out just about any kind of coupon on the Internet these days.”
“[Expletive] [expletive] [expletive],” Minot wailed. “Hey, wait a [expletive] minute! How about the [expletive] funnies, huh? How about them?”
“Right,” I said, considering the extent of his desperation carefully. “We’re talking ‘Doonesbury,’ ‘Pickles,’ ‘Mark Trail,’ ‘Candorville,’ ‘Prickly City,’ ‘Beetle Bailey,’ ‘Brewster Rockit: Space Guy,’ ‘Argyle Sweater,’ ‘Red and Rover,’ ‘Lio,’ ‘Garfield,’ ‘Non Sequitur…’
“And ‘Dilbert!’” Minot added, defiantly.
“All of which,” I mentioned as nicely as possible, “anyone can read on the Internet, plus about a hundred others the Washington Post doesn’t have room to print, including, as a matter of fact, ‘Zippy the Pinhead,’ by Bill Griffith, which the Post dropped a few months back and ‘Boondocks,’ by Aaron McGruder, which the Post dropped a couple of years ago – because they were too surreal and too edgy, respectively; and a lot of people here in DC actually miss reading them, too. But you can still get those and plenty of other comics, that, truth be told, the Post would never print, right there on the World Wide Web. And what’s more, the market for comics is shrinking, anyway. Sure, there might be a continued demand for the ones that offer topical social and political commentary, but who needs to read ‘Prince Valiant’ when you can log on to World of Warcraft and be a medieval knight – or wizard or dwarf or whatever – yourself? Who needs to read ‘Spiderman’ when you can log on to There and be a superhero any time you feel like it? And who the hell needs to read ‘Blondie’ when you can log on to The Sims and be a virtual harried suburban career woman with a clueless husband – entirely on your own? And besides, think of all the trees the Washington Post has consumed over the last century, not to mention the New York Times. My God, if just those two papers alone went out of business, it would save millions upon millions of acres!”
“Screw the [expletive] trees,” Minot proclaimed in a self-righteous tone.
“But think what that could do to prevent global warming,” I chided. “It might save the polar bears!”
“Then screw the [expletive] polar bears, too,” he snapped. “We newspaper journalists have to make a [expletive] living, you know!”
“Well,” I needled, “say what you will about the ethics of telling obscenely wealthy corporations to ‘Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table,’ at least it’s not destroying the Amazon rain forest to make newsprint stock.”
“No,” Minot sighed, “I guess not.”
“It’s also pretty ironic, isn’t it,” I ventured, “that the subject of the first Washington Post ‘salon’ was going to be health care?”
“Maybe,” Minot groused, “but the way I see it, a newspaper that’s world famous for investigative journalism in the public interest strutting its Pulitzer Prize stable of reporters around in front of business tycoons like child sex slaves in a Bangkok brothel parading their goodies for stinking drunk Australian pedophiles is about ten times more ironic than that!”
“Probably,” I allowed. “On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and the Atlantic Monthly have all thrown similar shindigs; just not, as the Post was proposing, behind closed doors. Those other publications did everything out in the open, and, more importantly, everything said was on the record.”
“Take it from an experienced journalist,” Minot sneered as he took yet another deep swig of expensive firewater, “speaking on the record is vastly over-rated.”
“I also heard some talk,” I continued, “that Ms. Weymouth was e-mailing invitations to members of Congress and forgetting to mention that the Post was also inviting lobbyists and charging corporations big bucks to attend.”
“Ah, [expletive], Collins,” Minot scowled. “Funny thing about that. She forgot to tell the newsroom the very same [expletive] stuff!”
“At least,” I remarked, “your executive editor issued a statement saying that access to Washington Post journalists isn’t for sale.”
“Not if that [expletive] Weymouth gets all the [expletive] money,” Minot growled. “That’s for [expletive] sure!”