Do they still exist?
When I was a child we had two newspapers in our suburb of Los Angeles. One came in the morning and one at night. At different times we subscribed to both or one at a time. We had a ritual and a pecking order. My dad got first go at the paper and as he finished he would pass it out to the rest of the family. He might share parts he wasn’t interested in or that he would get to later but it was a ritual at his mercy. On Sunday we received a paper but were not allowed to look at it until after church.
The funnies were the comics page. Some were serials and others one day stuff. Some was drama, some humor. We had Little Orphan Annie, Beetle Baily and Mutt and Jeff. In addition I would always go to the editorial page for the political cartoon. Salted throughout were things like “Why we Say...” and “Love means...”.
I don’t know if such a thing still exists. Last time I saw one the majority of cartoons were meaningful only to people with too much drugs in their system or an extreme leftward leaning indoctrination. That assumes that the two categories are mutually exclusive.
Now I browse the different web sites that collect humor. There is more variety but I still miss the old rituals.
homo unius libri
There used to be two papers in our town, too, Pumice. The morning one was considered the republican paper; the evening one was considered the democrat paper. They were both owned by a company upstate and shared the same office and presses, only at different hours of the day.
ReplyDeleteThey eventually sold out to a national company that combined the two papers. Instead of the combined "balanced" paper we were promised, we now have a morning democrat paper. It's barely fit to line a bird cage.
After I quit subscribing, Mom would give me her Sunday paper and, for a long time, I'd glance at the headlines and the editorials, then read the funnies. Now that I'm old and hopelessly jaded, I just throw the whole thing away, unless I'm in the mood to do the crossword. I DO keep a small supply on hand for occasional packing jobs and emergency toilet paper if TSHTF.
Keep in mind that the reason it was good for lining bird cages was that the birds can't read, they went to public school.
DeleteGrace and peace.