A Reluctant Time Traveler

Every week, I fall behind a little bit more.

Sometimes, it makes me feel like a time traveler, stuck in reverse in a slow-moving time machine, dropping back a week or two every week, with no hope of ever catching up.

It is, of course, the fault of those darn newspapers. And, maybe, television. Or the Republicans in Congress. I also blame the Democrats who still support Hillary and are not in Congress, or just my friends and neighbors.

Nah, cross out my neighbors, who seem to have very little interest in politics or world affairs. And, as for my friends, I won’t go there. I just can’t afford to lose any more friends because of my rantings.

So, we will stay with that simple fact - there is just too much news in the daily papers - and on cable (if you keep a mind open enough to watch more than one news channel) to digest in just one day.

Heck, every Sunday the New York Times alone gives enough information to keep me busy until sometime next Wednesday afternoon - more if you count the several weeks of the Times Book Review. That part of the Times is particularly insidious, because I take it with me when I start to read something, only to put it away for later.

You can find old Times Book Reviews in the big stack on a dog crate in my dining room, in our bathroom magazine rack, a desk in the office, or someplace else where it seemed to make sense to put it down.

My wife helps me cull the stacks of newspapers, of course. So, too, do our cats, who can’t resist using a stack of newspapers as a spare litter box. Of course, once the smelly papers are taken to the recycling bin, they only expose other, older papers that were also set aside. Kind of like a perverse, four-legged archeologist.

Now, I could probably read all the papers in a week or two if only I weren’t reading other things on-line, and listening to the news develop in real time on cable television. And, sucker that I am, I watch the same news developing each day on different programs - some of which are on different networks. I get a kind of subtle joy in watching how little a story has changed from day to night, or how the stories that are reported in the evening are picked up unchanged the next day.

That is probably what started the time traveling. Blame television for not letting me finish the stack of papers I have left to read, and blame the cat for not ruining the remains of that stack. And, too, blame the media for putting so much stuff in the daily news mix that I just can’t ever finish. Sort of like going forward to the past.

It reminds me of a Greek myth. I am pushing a stack of newspapers toward the edge of a cliff (in this case, a big recycling bucket) and no matter how hard or how long I push, while some papers fall off the edge, the pile of papers just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

So, what is in those papers and on-line magazines and other spigots of information that keeps flooding my pool of slightly out of date news?

Well, there’s a Sports Illustrated piece explaining just what went wrong with Mets former Ace pitcher Matt Harvey, the criminal charges against Martin Winterkorn - the former Volkswagen Chief Executive who was in charge when VW’s diesel emissions cheating scandal was discovered, and a fine story on how Facebook’s expansion into Artificial Intelligence was draining robotics professors from some of our finest universities.

Not to mention the difficulties our nation’s new tariffs are creating for the solar panel industry, the long-delayed toxic cleanup in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, and Zora Neale Hurston’s book on an Alabama man believed to be the last living person captured in Africa and brought to America on a slave ship. Well, he’s no longer living, and she wrote it in 1931, and it was just about to be published - two stories in one.

When I started writing this, I was holding the Sunday Times news section, with several long stories that I want to take some time to read. One is a well-researched and well-reported stories on a Pennsylvania state lawmaker who had to get a bodyguard to enforce an order of protection she has against another Republican state lawmaker she used to date. Another is about how Trump fixer Michael Cohen built his financial empire. The third is a touching story about how Senator John McCain is looking back on his amazing life.

That was last week. Now, Sunday is here again, and I have to put away the things I haven’t read. More news in the driveway, and on television. And just waiting to jump out of my computer, my tablet and my phone.

The point of sharing all this information inundation is to show just how difficult it is to be well-informed nowadays. There’s just too much happening to keep track of, which makes it a little hollow and pretentious to have opinions on everything under the sun. 

You can, of course, just hate everything the other party does, which does not require much thought. Or you could look some stuff up and make up your own mind, of only you knew what subjects you should be looking at.

Well, have no fear, I will continue to have opinions, and to share them, and even to explain why I feel the way I do, which is something sorely missing from some talk shows. 

(Tip - never take a political comment from a sports commentator seriously. Or from any commentator on a network where everyone has the same opinion. But, if you must find someone else to echo, take your opinion from the host who makes the least noise.)

So, seriously, how can you ever make sense out of anything with this deluge of information going on around you 24/7? 

Well, International Business Machines used to have a slogan that kind of pointed the way for us, although they haven’t been using it lately. I am sure they dropped it long before Watson became their spokesperson, or spokescomputer, or cloud-based message targeter.

You may remember it. THINK.

It’s a good start. And let me add a thought of my own. DON’T REPEAT UNLESS YOU HAVE SOMETHING WORTHWHILE TO ADD.

Well, maybe that’s too much. THINK is shorter, and better, and more to the point. But, IBM had a lot of time to work on its slogan*, and I came up with mine in about five minutes. 

It shows why journalism is only  a first draft of history.

• - Historic footnote. Thomas J. Watson Sr., brought the slogan “THINK” to the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in New York City when it was formed in a merger in 1914. He actually thought up “Think" when he was managing the sales and advertising department of the National Cash Register Company in December, 1911.  Kind of gives you something to think about.