One for The Nation
Dick Dell in Chicago, who writes here occasionally, has been debating whether to renew his subscription to The Nation. A worthy publication, no question, and both he and I subscribed back in the bad old Bush days when any liberal journal was, by definition, under siege and well worth supporting, defending, and befriending.
There was also a matter of conscience. I would pull The Nation off the rack in Barnes & Noble, read it in the coffee shop, then replace it on the way out.
Didn’t seem fair, so I subscribed.
Now Dick is getting listless, and who can blame him? Anyone who regularly watches Keith Olbermann and/or Rachel Maddow and maybe Chris Matthews or Ed Schultz has already been exposed to much of the information and many of the viewpoints that will arrive in The Nation several days later – ironically, with the very astute help of Chris Hayes, Washington editor of The Nation, whom Keith and Rachel often feature in lively interviews.
On the other hand, none of those folks have the cryptic puzzle by Frank H. Lewis that has appeared in The Nation since the late 1940s.
It can be addictive. Lewis recently retired, and the editors haven’t figured out how to replace him, so they’ve been running some of the puzzles he wrote for them over the past six decades. You’d be surprised how difficult it can be to solve a puzzle written in, say, the 1950s, when the world was different and the average neuron could count on a good night’s sleep.
Then there’s this. We’re required by law to contribute to the salaries of Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Inhofe, Coburn, Sessions, Kip Bond, Shelby, Boehner, Kantor, McConnell, and various other lying, self-dealing, mean-spirited gougers and exploiters of working Americans.
In a just society, they would all have to refund their salaries and expenses and disgorge their corporate slush funds on the way to the stockade.
Failing that, one way to counterbalance this outrageous misappropriation of our taxes is for people like Dick Dell and me to send a little money every once in a while to The Nation.
Dick finally decided to renew. He doesn’t care for cryptic puzzles, but he likes meretricious proto-fascists even less.