Non-Required Reading

Last Sunday I was in a cab driving down to Fells Point-Baltimore's equivalent of today's gentrified East Village-with my 13-year-old son Nicky, explaining that there was no way an Xbox 360 would be under the family's Christmas tree later this month. Although Nicky has been a gamer since before he could read, in the last year he's lost interest, preferring to spend lots of time downloading music and making short movies.

My wife and I were tickled at this development-not that he admitted it, but the unread copies of PlayStation and Electronic Gaming Monthly on his desk told the story-since the appalling prospect of our elder son gabbing for hours with clerks at Entertainment Boutique or GameStop when he was 25 was reason enough to consider a move to Sicily or St. Lucia. Unfortunately, Nick belatedly got caught up in the hype for the new Microsoft product and was trying to build a case for one of his parents to wait in line for 25 hours at Best Buy when the next shipment comes in. I wasn't buying his rationale, but just for the hell of it decided to test the magnitude of his desire for this cash-eating-$400 for the machine and then games at 50 bucks a pop-monstrosity.

Would he and his brother Booker be willing, as an indulgence to fuddy-duddy Dad, to spend a half hour each morning before school reading the print version of a newspaper of their choice? "Why in the world would I want to do that?" he asked, saying that he receives all vital information from "The Daily Show" and the Drudge Report. (Booker, at least, gets his hands dirty reading the funnies in The Washington Post every day.) It was at least a temporary setback, and I changed topics to the best films of the year, with Nicky choosing Crash while I opted for A History of Violence. Still, the conversation continued to nag at me later on in the day, remembering how my own father taught me how to read in kindergarten by laying out the sports pages and stock tables in New York's Herald Tribune every morning before he went to work at his car wash on Jericho Turnpike.

But then came the epiphany: Considering all the crummy newspaper writing contained in dailies and magazines early in this century, wouldn't the force-feeding of this garbage to my kids be the equivalent of giving them packs of Kool cigarettes? Wading through the clips on my office floor, I came across scores of articles that ought to have a warning at the top telling the reader that the opinions expressed below are for gullible audiences only.

For example, on December 2, both The New York Times and its sister paper The Boston Globe ran stories on the Samuel Alito Supreme Court nomination that, in an era of strict editors, would've been spiked immediately. The Times article, under the joint byline of Carl Hulse and David Kirkpatrick, aided, as noted at the story's conclusion, by reporting from Richard Stevenson (is it any wonder newspapers, in a more competitive environment, are having economic problems when three staffers are involved in an 800-word dispatch?), was headlined "After Memo, Democrats Are Taking Firmer Stance Against Alito Nomination."

Sounded like trouble for Alito and George Bush, but upon reading the piece, the only Democrats cited were Senators Teddy Kennedy and Chuck Schumer, a pair of judicial obstructionists who'd only agree to support a Bush nomination if the man or woman consistently received 100-percent approval from the ACLU, NAACP and NOW. The Globe story-written by a sole reporter, perhaps indicating that The New York Times Co. is cutting back on its Boston operation-had the headline "Top Democrats Question Alito's Credibility" and was just as misleading as the Times article, except that it added one extra "top Democrat," Senator Patrick Leahy, that noted centrist from Vermont.

One assumes novelist/senator Barbara Boxer, a woman who regularly embarrasses the great state of California, was unavailable for comment.

I wish former John F. Kennedy aides Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Theodore Sorensen good health as they edge closer to the eternal, but can't the Times (and The New York Review of Books) stop taking advantage of their slavish devotion to the Camelot myth by printing absurd op-ed pieces like the one the pair cowrote for the November 4 edition? "What Would J.F.K. Have Done?" was yet another pointless bout of speculation about whether Kennedy would've pulled out of Vietnam had he not been assassinated. Conveniently for them, we'll never know, so they're free, as "front-row" spectators at Kennedy's White House, to claim the martyred president would've withdrawn from Vietnam.

This exercise was, of course, an opportunity to bash Bush's Iraq policy, as outlined in a speech last week at the Naval Academy. They write: "[W]e did not hear how or when the president plans to bring our forces back home-no facts, no numbers on American troop withdrawals, no dates, no references to our dwindling coalition, no reversal of his disdain for the United Nations, whose help he still expects. Neither our military, our economy nor our nation can take that kind of endless and remorseless drain for an only vaguely defined and political mission. If we leave early, the president said, catastrophe might follow. But what of the catastrophe that we are prolonging and worsening by our continued presence, including our continued, unforgivable mistreatment of detainees?"

If my kids want to read this kind of drivel, that's their choice. But I won't force it on them.

Ramesh Ponnuru, in a short post on National Review's website last Sunday, had a clever comeback to this ridiculous article. Tackling the question of what JFK would've done, Ponnuru wrote: "Gosh, I don't know. Maybe he would have our allies assassinated? Maneuvered us unnecessarily to the brink of nuclear war.? Nor did the president confess to being a dimwitted, arrogant, narrow-minded fundamentalist. Which he would have had to have done to give the perfect Bush speech, as written by these worthies." n

-December 5