Mon 5 Jan 2009
There’s a tradition in this young country of ours to overly venerate anything that’s been around long enough to reflect on how long it’s been around. Consider, if you will, the entire VH1 network, which seems to exist solely to remind people about the golden old days of….the 1980s.
Still, there are some insitutions of note, having actually been around for a generation or more, and two of them were on my mind this morning.
The New Yorker, in their current issue, is celebrating the Village Voice, the tempestuous, opionated paper of the meat and mindspace of Greenich Village in Manhattan.
But as I sat reading it this morning, I knew ( thanks to @themediaisdying on Twitter. the new new thing, vs. the arguably dying print form of media ) that Nat Hantoff had been let go from the paper. He’s been their since 1958, surely long enough to be an sort of institution in his own right, especially by American terms.
And in the shower later, I wondered–with so many media outlets falling apart, who will be left? And will, in ten years, some mediocre rag that by dint of luck rather than substance managed to escape the scythe ripping though the printed media outlets theses days, be something that we look as being worthy of the same respect as the hundreds of books quietly slipping beneath the waves now?
An apt metaphor, perhaps; after the Titanic, those lost were mourned, surely, and yet those who survived, however meager their lives before or acts after, were held in some regard, the very act of making it to dry land in dark seas a miracle that implied some divine provience.
