Ironically, newspapers can be sanity pills. Over a lifetime, I have found the morning newspaper ritual to be highly stabilizing, despite the frantic and destabilizing nature of the news itself. Whatever convulsions might occur, there at least is Art Buchwald, smiling and unfunny as ever, to remind me that the world has not been totally overturned while I slept.
I don't like change in the basic structure of my newspaper. When the Times front page went color, it was like the lights going on at Wrigley. And when I recently found that George Schultz's space had been replaced by Dilbert (Dilbert!), it hit me like a ton of dogfood.
Peanuts was rarely laugh-out-loud funny. It was poignant and cute. But behind the cuteness and infusing it was some kind of warm Truth, for lack of a better word. Kids playing baseball and fretting school; kids with healthy instincts and doubts; kids not innocent but somehow pure. It was a beautiful strip, and on any given day it had more soul than the rest of them combined.
To have Peanuts replaced by Dilbert represents a loud 'click' in the culture, a big symbolic step in the wrong direction, a diluting of our common newspaper culture. For Dilbert is a sad representative of our sad zeitgeist; an ugly icon of ugly times, whereas Peanuts was a sweet icon of the same ugly times, and somehow Charlie Brown even had more to say about the psychology of Cubicle Man than Dilbert and his dog will ever know.
Like Peanuts, Fidel Castro is another reassuring constant of the second half of the twentieth century. When he dies even the most rabid Cold Warriors will shed a tear, if only to mark the final passing of their life work and the Age in which it mattered.
The latest episode to give the Cuban expats a chance to whine and Castro to shine is a no-brainer. This child, Elian, has family in Cuba. His mother was most likely forced to leave by her abusive boyfriend. Since he has been in the US he has been used as a billboard for Tommy Hilfiger and dragged around by a power hungry expat population that still cannot accept the fact that they lost a civil war and is probably clinically and collectively insane. The kid should have been sent back immediately, just to get him away from these freaks.
The Elian controversy is just a taste of what Cuban expats are capable of, along with terrorism and chemical warfare against socialized Cuban agriculture. One can easily imagine a scenario in the post-Castro future where Batista-era elites file a class action suit along with the American Fruit Corporation to get back their land, casinos and hotels. Some of the land will probably still be nationalized and most of the casinos and hotels owned by European investors. This conflict between Cuban expats/American firms and European resort capital just might hold the seeds of the next world war: the US versus the EU over the same tropical island that almost sparked a global conflict nearly forty years ago. This is would be irony as sweet as uncut Cuban sugar cane. President-for-life Admiral McCain, long since in power after a military coup, would personally lead the second Bay of Pigs, this time with full air support and no room for CIA excuses.
Speaking of the Cold War, it seems our columnists are a bit confused about what to make of post-Yeltsin Russia. A few are rightly concerned by Putin's past affiliation with the KGB. After all, the KGB had a history of extra-legal subversion and spying, and one can't help but worry about a country where someone from secret intelligence comes to lead the government. Can you imagine?
I personally find Putin likeable. A judo master, economist, and a sleuth. Hunk city, if you ask me.
