The New York Times is not on my regular list of reading periodicals. Among those that I do read, I pick up a copy of Time magazine only during a visit to the dental office. My place of employment subscribes to Newsweek (which, by the way, is said to be discontinuing its print edition), so I occasionally thumb through an issue or two.
Two papers I read through on a regular basis are the Bennington Banner and the Rutland Herald. The local Mrs. Murphy's donut shop in Manchester, Vt. distributes these papers among the morning regulars there, cost free.
Occasionally, I ask my wife if she minds my picking up a copy of The New York Times to read during breakfast in another local eatery. "Occasionally" means once every three months or so. For me, the two dollars and fifty is too steep a price to pay for U.S. State Department balderdash posing as news. But on those rare moments when I do encounter it, I find The Times mildly entertaining.
The last issue I browsed a few days ago incorporated a pleasant surprise. One of its writers, Joe Sharkey, was venting about poor air service between small American cities. Said Sharkey, "[A]t the Houston airport late that night, I waited for a hotel shuttle bus while listening to repetitions of that singularly irritating security announcement used at Houston. You know, the one in which the lady with a voice like Granny on 'The Beverly Hillbillies' warns that 'inappropriate remarks or jokes concerning security may result in your arrest."
One hopes for Mr. Sharkey's sake that he is making comments such as the above when he is far from any airport. Statements such as his are far too cynical to pass for non-terrorist diatribes in the current political climate. His words can only signify "defiance," in the same manner as Iran's insistance on carrying out a nuclear program is often characterized by Sharkey's own cronies in the mainstream press as "definance." But one does not expect to detect such defiance, however muffled it may be (relegated to the last lines in Sharkey's column) in a mainstream periodical. Do we see signs that those in the outer rim of the inner circle are beginning to suffer signs of discontent?
