The Joy of Press Clips
And a Sunday comic
By now, my readers are familiar with my newsprint addiction/eccentricities/obsession.
It began in high school, when I acquired this handy tool for zipping through The New York Times and clipping articles I knew I’d do something with some day, though that something turned out to be filing in folders and forgetting in boxes for about 40 years.
I’ve started clipping again, and I recommend the practice as a way of focusing on news and perspectives you can only find in great newspapers and from great independent voices.
One of the most most valuable such voices remains Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury—still with original content on Sundays. I took out my little zippy pal for this one about the new “newspeak” we read about in high school:
Garry Trudeau suggests using banned works in conversation and committing them to memory before they’re lost forever. And his strip concluded with a QR code that led to this message, instead of a complete list of banned words that was apparently taken down by Google but is appearing in digital samizdat like this, and now here:
First they came for our Doonesbury. Then they came for our birds.
Have you heard about the Virginia Tech professor of fish and wildlife conservation who had her National Science Foundation grant revoked because her research into how outdoor bird feeders were affecting wildlife mentioned “diversity” of bird populations?
It’s hard to pin down just how far the new “newspeak” will take us—how many agencies will be shuttered, people fired, services ended and lives put at risk because Donald Trump and Stephen Miller1 drew up that list. We still haven’t seen very many of the court processes now in motion play out to their conclusion, and Trump changes direction, goes back on decisions, and re-hires people at lightning speed.
But for now, we can all ask ourselves, “why can’t we be more like Romania?”
I used to drive from my house in Silver Spring, MD to the original Newsroom in Dupont Circle, where I would spend $5.75 for yesterday’s edition of the Guardian. If I could still get my hands on a Beloved Print Edition of that newspaper, I would have clipped this profile of the newly elected president of Romania, Nicușor Dan, who has now taken Romania along the electoral path seen in Canada and Australia, where favored right-wing candidates are losing at least in part because of Donald Trump.
Born in the central city of Făgăraș, Dan is a brilliant mathematician, having won gold at the International Maths Olympiads in the 1980s. He earned a master’s degree from France’s prestigious École Normale Supérieure and a PhD from the Sorbonne.
Back in Romania, he became deeply involved in civic activism, campaigning effectively against corrupt and illegal high-rise property development in central Bucharest and to preserve the capital’s historic buildings and green spaces.
Dan is not, he admits, “the greatest of communicators”, but says he is learning fast – and his softly spoken, quietly persuasive style proved highly effective against the more impetuous, Maga-like Simion, whom he demolished in a major TV debate.
I can’t imagine a gold-medal winning mathematician winning the presidency here, but it’s nice to know that voters somewhere are willing to reward intelligence, vision and competence.
Meanwhile, we’re still getting used to what happens when we elect someone who lacks those qualities.
I’m waiting for the big Stephen Miller expose to bring home to wider audiences how evil and dangerous the real brains behind the throne (insert your own graphic imagery here) is. Journalists who read this—is it out there?