News of the World
By David Steffen
It’s May, 2021, and we seem to have found ourselves at the beginning of the end of the Pandemic. Masks are still the order of the day—at least for the rational majority among us, and about one-half of the American population has received at least one dose of a vaccine. Almost one-third are fully vaccinated. (California’s numbers mirror the national numbers.)
Since we began publishing the Lighthouse Peddler in 2016, Dolly and I have made the monthly 2-hour drive to Healdsburg Printing to get the Peddler printed. Once there—pre-pandemic, we’d review the first copies of the new issue, make last minute corrections, kill an hour or two, and have lunch while the printer prepared our order. We would then make the drive home and start delivering the new Peddler to locations from Jenner to Elk.
A year ago we found that due to COVID, Healdsburg (like towns everywhere) had become a relatively quiet place, as the local population opted to stay indoors and fewer casual travelers were on the road. Nevertheless we continued our monthly drives to the printer, load the papers into the car, get a bag of fast-food and head home. Near the end of the year, some restaurants with socially-distanced outdoor seating began to lure us back in for lunch, albeit all masked up, sitting at a table on a front sidewalk, or a back patio, or a secluded deck to enjoy a little lunch almost like we did “in the pre-Covid days”.
When it comes to national and international news in print, I continue to find myself browsing and reading the New York Times and the Washington Post. Reading the Times is a habit I picked up while working in New York and I’ve maintained my subscription over the years. I’ll admit that after 170 years of publication, “The Old Gray Lady” is not the paper it used to be. But I persist. My other daily read, the Post, has improved dramatically over the past decade, and I must assume that having the financial security of being owned by zillionaire Jeff Bezos helps. In addition to the owner’s deep pockets, the Post’s resurgence has been helped during the past five years with coverage of 2015’s crazy presidential primary campaign, an election in 2016 (the outcome of which was reportedly helped by a former KGB guy in Moscow,) an orange-haired blowhard who managed to tell a well-documented 30,000 lies while president, the 2020 campaign, and the campaign's aftermath (including the January 6 riot at the capitol by Trump Supporters. In short, the Post has had plenty of material to fill its pages.
While spending more time indoors, one of the things we’ve done (perhaps to excess) is watch TV. During those budget-conscious, mostly shut-in days, we scoured the various channels available to us, sifting through fiction, non-fiction, fantasy, comedy, drama, documentaries and more. Some were great, some were average, and some, as my mother might have told me, “are just crap”. But good, bad or in between, TV did its part, and our attention was temporarily diverted from the Pandemic. For example, we watched the new version of "All Creatures Great & Small" from public television and rediscovered dramas like “NCIS” or “The Mentalist”. Beyond “entertainment”, however one defines it, reading newspapers and catching some television news has also been informative and, frankly, entertaining.
One evening we found ourselves ready to spend the ‘big bucks’ for a first run film. I found one pay-per-view title, a film whose synopsis suggested it might be worth the $20 ticket price: “News of the World” from director Paul Greengrass, starring Tom Hanks. The premise is so old-fashioned, one wonders how the book got published or the film even got made. And yet, it turns out the story and the movie were worth it. It also made me wonder just what others were thinking of this film.
If you’ve seen “News of the World”, you may have concluded (and as some fans of westerns might agree) it is no “Tombstone” or “Silverado” or “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence”. But it does leave you feeling like your $20 was well spent. The premise is this: Hanks portrays Captain Jefferson Kidd, an officer from the recently concluded American Civil War. Kidd travels from Texas town to Texas town, buying newspapers wherever he goes. At the next town, he sets up an evening of ‘pay per view’ circa 1870. Selecting stories almost at random from the collection of newspapers in his leather satchel, he reads all or parts of those stories that he believes that particular town will be interested in hearing. Members of the audience, in the unpretentious glow of lantern light, pay him a dime a head for the evening.
In his December 2020 review, the Washington Post’s Michael O’Sullivan wrote that the film, set in Texas during reconstruction, presents a Confederate veteran who “makes his meager living reading a curated selection of newspaper articles aloud to audiences . . . this broad-minded, bighearted western tale takes place in a frontier (emblematic of a whole country, really) that is undergoing awkward and sometimes violent growing pains.” In essence, Kidd is Google or Facebook, but without the “friending” thing. No cellphone app needed. Just sit down and listen to Kidd.
Thinking about “News of the World” I decided to take a look at just that: the news of the world. Our world. During the last week of April 2021, here are some stories that a modern-day Kidd might have covered.
Walter Mondale died at 93. He will be remembered for being that rare entity in politics. Honest, diligent and fair. He also suffered what is probably the single largest landslide loss (to Ronald Reagan in 1984) in any presidential election in 230 years.
NASA shipped a small (4 pound) helicopter to Mars. When I saw the film clip of the 30 second flight over the Martian surface I half-expected to see an Amazon logo on the side of the helicopter.
Back on Earth, a jury found Officer Derek Chauvin guilty on all counts in the death of George Floyd. For the most part, the country let go a collective sigh of relief. And perhaps—only perhaps—this will mark the beginning of the dismantling of one facet of the systemic racism that’s been hanging around this land for 400 years.
Edward Jenner might be pleased and also surprised. As of the end of April, more than 145 million people in this country have been vaccinated. Jenner (1749-1823) pioneered the concept of vaccines, the first of which became a reality in 1796 against smallpox. The vaccine was a success but about twenty minutes later (or so) the anti-vaxers arrived. Really. During the following century vaccines would be developed to fight cholera, rabies, tetanus, typhoid fever and bubonic plague. Obviously, two centuries later the Flat-Earth Society, including those in the the anti-vaccination crowd, is still with us, which just proves what comedian Ron White has been telling us for years: “you can’t fix stupid”. Not convinced? Read on.
Remember April 23, 2020? That was the day that the then-president (the one with orange hair) suggested that ingesting bleach or inserting a UV light into our bodies will cure COVID. Predictably, someone heard that as a call to action. I was raised a Lutheran in Wisconsin, and have worshipped in churches of varying denominations from California to England, but until this week I hadn’t heard of the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing. According to HuffPost, the founder of the Church is a former scientologist named Jim Humble who “claims to be a billion-year-old god from the Andromeda Galaxy . . . .”
Last week a man named Mark Grenon of the Genesis II Church in Florida, was arrested along with his three sons for selling “Miracle Mineral Solution” (MMS), a homemade blend of ingredients which could cure everything from COVID to cancer. It appears that MMS is, essentially, bleach. The Washington Post added “. . . the FDA has ‘received reports of people requiring hospitalizations, developing life-threatening conditions, and dying after drinking MMS.’” (No word yet on whether the Grenon family will be offering UV lights, ready for insertion).
The news of the world is worth reading in newspaper form, hearing on the radio, watching on television, or consuming via your computer or iPhone app. Or perhaps there’s another Captain Jefferson Kidd out there who will read it to you for a dime. However the news arrives, we know that we live—as an apocryphal old curse attempted to warn us—in interesting times. Radio host Randi Rhodes likes to say, "Information is Power. So get some!" And please, stay safe!
