Better here than anywhere

— What’s black and white and read all over?

The old riddle is destroyed (like most song lyrics) when it’s set in print. It relies on the homophone “read” being perceived as “red” by the subject, and the subsequent confusion of images it conjures. What’s black and white and red all over? A zebra with a massive head wound? (In France, the answer could be L’Humanite, the newspaper that was long connected to the French Communist Party.)

I wonder if it’s possible the riddle has any currency with people under the age of 40 or so, who likely grew up unaddicted to its classic answer. Newspapers probably lost their utility as a metaphor for ubiquity sometime in the early 1980s, maybe about the time I started working in them.Even then I remember thinking that they were less a populist item than they pretended-a newspaper audience has always been a self-selected class of readers. And even when I started in the business, America was home to a large class of technically literate non-readers.

I am thankful you are not one of them.

One of the disadvantages of writing a column for a Sunday newspaper is that Thursday very seldom falls on a Sunday, and so there is little opportunity for me to write the obligatory Thanksgiving column. You know, one of those columns in which the professional opinionizer lays down his sword for the moment to display his wise and warm side, to reminisce about the America in which he grew up believing, with its food smells and football and tow-headed twins with gap-toothed grins.

The point those columns generally come around to is that there are more important things in life than those we habitually bicker over, and that we should all be glad to live in a country so wide and generous as our own, with its elbow room and amber waves of grain, founded by a group of rebels with a fetish for freedom.

I am thankful not to have to write that sort of column, although I generally concur with the sentiment. We have a nice thing going here, though not so nice that it can’t be screwed up. The American vice is irrational fear, coupled with a perilous inclination to magical thinking that I attribute to the sort of self satisfied intellectual laziness that afflicts people who are by and large removed from the harshest realities of the world.

We should be thankful for our relative comfort, but we should also realize that nothing is guaranteed but the inevitability of change. Bombs are smaller these days, the weather is more rash, and our own bodies harbor traitors. Every moment is more precious than we can bring ourselves to believe, for every second is fraught with catastrophic possibility. To live heedless of the miracle of one’s own existence is to waste one’s time-one needn’t believe in the supernatural to acknowledge that sensual experience is a gift. It is good to be alive, even if being alive means exposing yourself to the inevitable sorrows, the low hum of pain that attends every heartbeat.

Your mileage may vary, but I would rather be here than anywhere else.

I love this time of year. I love the autumnal tug toward darkness, the cooling air, the forced colors and the clarity afforded by another trip around the sun. My birthday is in November, as well as my wedding anniversary, and other dates, too private and obscure to relate here. It is the time of year when I usually take a little time off, when we travel and spend a little more time with friends. It is the time for stock-taking, for the re-ordering of priorities. Call it Thanksgiving.

This has been an eventful year for us, and I suspect that from here on out they will all be eventful. People have died, and many things have changed in the past year, though I suspect things are better in more ways than they are worse. Or maybe it’s just that I have become more comfortable with reality, though I feel no closer to wisdom than I did when I was 17. I don’t know much more than I did at that age, though I try to pay attention.

The fact that I am writing this before Thanksgiving for the Sunday after might seem to be a problem for some-the cycles come fast and furious these days, little bonfires erupt and die out on the Internet within hours, people learn about the world through Twitter and Facebook-but the truth is I have never written (or thought) all that quickly. I’m thankful my job has not changed all that much.

I do more-I curate a blog, I maintain a Facebook presence, I hardly ever turn down a chance to go on television-but I am lucky to be what I have wanted to be since I realized I had no future as a third baseman or a point guard. (I am a newspaper columnist, an “inky wretch” in the parlance of our Paul Greenberg, who-along with Murray Kempton, Jim Murray, Jimmy Breslin, Nat Hentoff, et al.-was one of my first models.)

I do not believe I will live to see the end of newspapers, though there are those who would say they are already gone, that there’s too much free content out there-a lot of it of quality-to ever corral it back behind some pay wall. Some of my favorite writers do it for free-or for whatever psychic satisfaction their act brings them-and the blockheads persist despite my best advice. (If everyone would just listen to me.)

But things change. That’s the nature of the universe, and all this too will pass away. This republic, this world. Like that great philosopher Kris Kristofferson once said, “Let’s just be glad we had this time to spend together.”

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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blooddirtandangels.com

Perspective, Pages 76 on 11/25/2012

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