Is the Sunday paper here? I need to clean the birdcage.

The philosophy of "out of sight, out of mind" is just another way we fool ourselves that things aren't important. Pull up the sofa cushions and I bet a river of memories come flooding back based on the food, receipts and ear rings you find stashed there. Memories that, once the visual stimulus is gone, are pushed to the deep abyss of one's mind like the dust devils we sweep under the carpet just before company arrives.

As a society, we've declared the remembrance of certain events sacrosanct. For years the media, tenders of our collective memory, have seen fit to remind us of these events with the subtlety of a hooker approaching a conventioneer in a Las Vegas nightclub. Headlines serve as flashcards of constant learning for the most important of events. Earth Day, Saint Patrick's Day, New Year's and soon Obama Day will never be forgotten because the media will jog our memory away from the mundane news of Britney, Paris and O.J. back to what is meaningful.

The media swung a broadsword in their unabashed push for The One this past election cycle. It is easy to see what they deem important. It is also easy to see what they don't.



Today should be a day of remembrance. In 1941, 2403 soldiers and innocents died in the dawn raid at Pearl Harbor. Until the 2001 attack on September 11th this was the single largest death toll of any attack on our shores. The blue waters of Hawaii cover the evidence of this tragedy more effectively than a black outfit hides rolls of fat for Oprah when she is off her diet.

I took a look at the web sites for the top 15 newspapers in the United States according to circulation. These include the USA Today, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning New and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Not a single one had a major headline regarding Pearl Harbor and only the USA Today and Wall Street Journal had any mention at all about the attacks on their home pages. I did learn that Chickens do more than cross the road and read a discussion about who should perform at the inauguration in the LA Times and Atlanta Journal Constitution respectfully. I think Barbara Streisand ought to come out of retirement yet again to perform. The DC police are worried about crowd control and I am sure she will help clear the streets.

Last September the headlines regarding the attacks by Islamic Terrorists in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania received less coverage than the year before. The footage of the planes hitting the World Trade Center ought to be mandatory viewing once a month but there is an unwritten agreement to avoid discussing it the same way Carmella Soprano refused to discuss Tony's late night business meetings. Our nation has the memory of an Alzheimer patient and the media is nurse Ratchet handing out placebos.

Is it any wonder every newspaper in the country is seeing huge declines in readership? With the power to influence comes the great responsibility to wield this power as a pen of unbiased reporting and not a sword of political and social desire.

The Chicago Tribune announced this weekend they have hired a bankruptcy attorney. Maybe if they, and the other print media, would spend less time trying to influence us and more time reporting so we could make up our own minds they wouldn't be experiencing the loss in readership they are.

Do me a favor, keep reminding everyone of what is important to remember.

I just ran over a pig-footed bandicoot with my Edsel so where is my bailout?

All you tree hugger types can relax. There is no way I would ever run over this four footed deer like marsupial in my Edsel. Actually there is no way I could ever run one over. It isn’t because I am not an excellent driver. I am. I am an excellent driver. Yes I am. Neither is it because I find the little log dwellers so adorable that I would sacrifice myself and my riders to avoid causing one harm. No there are two reasons I could never run over a pig-footed bandicoot with my Edsel. First I, like obviously many others throughout history, have absolutely no desire to own an Edsel. Second, the pig-footed bandicoot is extinct.

The complete impossibility of my ever having the occasion to use my Road Kill Recipes on the carcass of a freshly flattened little Aussie animal puts the current state of the automobile industry bailout, and our economy in total, into a whole new energy saving bulb’s light. I guess power saving CFL bulbs don’t suck so badly anymore and that to see a hypothetical newspaper headline of the future will require about as much scrutiny as President Elect Obama’s Campaign Finances got this past campaign. Imagine reading this:

Excellent bald headed driver runs over Kanab Ambersnail with his gas powered SUV

It seems doubtful this headline will ever appear. Why? Besides the fact I am an excellent driver (I am, I really am), in the future there may not be any Kanab Ambersnails left. There may be no SUVs. And there may be no newspapers! Extinction is a distinct possibility for all three.

So the question is: do we care? I don’t and I feel no shame about that.

Extinction is a natural course in nature. Eventually a stronger, faster and more evolved animal will come along and completely obliterate an existing species from the face of the earth. But enough about the business world and the fate of the newspaper industry you say. What happened to the poor little bandicoot. Can the lessons learned there save the Ambersnail? Can the lessons learned in previous bailouts save the big three auto makers and the New York Times?

Newspapers are like a starving predator that no longer is successful in the hunt because a faster and better killer has come along and is taking its source of food. Unless they can adapt, they will starve. And the arrogant types running these papers seem incapable of the forward thinking that will be required to make the evolutionary changes needed to keep them alive.

It is no surprise that in the unread pages of these soon to be defunct daily fish wrappers the actions of man are presumed to have caused the demise of the bandicoot in Australia. More accurately, the mandated inactions of man did the pouched little furball in. You see, for thousands of years in the south and west ofAustralia, Aborigines land management practice was to burn off vegetation. This patchwork of burnt out land provided the perfect place for the bandicoot to live. A combination of disease which decimated the happy band of wanderer’s population combined with the banning of their land management practices by a supposedly more advanced government policy led to a loss of habitat, food sources and eventually death for the bandicoot.

Another endangered species is also seeing its habitat shrink and government regulations are forcing it to adapt in ways that, although beneficial to it, may not be in its best interest. This species needs to change from within and sometimes that change requires the animal to get very sick before getting better. Survival is not guaranteed and to support it artificially means the weakened and less adapted can live on to get sick again in the near future. Dammit, I keep coming back to the auto industry.

You see, the automakers in Detroit have seen their commanding market shares shrink faster than the world’s fattest man’s waistline in preparation for his wedding. Foreign manufacturers are snapping up this share faster than a bride grabbing up a strapless at the annual one day sale at Filene’s Basement. Combine that with government CAFÉ standards and environmental regulations and the temporary spike in gas prices and exorbitant wages and antiquated factories and poor model choices and on and on and you begin to understand why the suited people walking around the local dealer’s lot look more like auditioning actors for “Day of the Dead IV: It died in the trunk” than professional automobile salespeople.

Honda, Toyota, Nissan and Hyundai all have plants in the United States that are doing much better then their domestic counterparts and they are not holding out their hands to the God of government asking for a reprieve from the evolutionary knife. Neither are the slimy little Kanab Ambersnails. The Ambernsails are living in a few little areas in the Southwest and other than some rats and other scavengers, the biggest threat to their existence would be for someone to open floodgates upstream from them on the Colorado River. You see the slugs are not in a position to adapt to the faster moving water and they will be dragged downstream to a habitat in which they can not exist.

The formerly cash flush car makers allowed themselves to get in deep water of their own with union wages and long term benefits that they now can’t afford to pay. They are in no position to make it through a flood. Do we hold back the water in an ever growing dam that eventually will break and wash these slugs away or do we let the water flow naturally and let nature take its course. This is a decision the collective minds of our politically savvy, business inept and morally devoid elected officials will make later this week.

The fact that I work for a company closely tied to the success of automotive dealers has me curious about and obviously interested in this decision. Until it is made, I suppose I will just have to drive around in my 4X4, avoiding animals and looking for a newspaper. I think I saw a box down by the Vinyl Record Store.

S2