The Found Child

Most of my blog posts are sort of polemical. Either I’m arguing a point, or trying to convince nonexistent readers of something, or just up on a soapbox ranting, like a homeless street-preacher. This is, however, just as tedious for me as it is for the readers (if they existed). So instead, today I’m just going to tell a story.

Last Sunday was, in the Orthodox Christian faith, the Feast of the Assumption, which marks the death and ascension to heaven of the Virgin Mary. It's a big deal at Assumption Greek Orthodox Church, my wife's family's church, which is named for the event. The congregation celebrates the Assumption with a big formal sit-down luncheon and dancing following the church service. We're not particularly regular about church attendance, but we show up for this one.

This year, my family happened to be seated at a table with an elderly couple—immigrant Greeks with thick accents, like my in-laws—and their young grandson. 

Something about the kid's appearance and demeanor appealed to me. He was a short, skinny little guy with pointed, birdlike features, thick glasses and a mop of unruly hair. He wore a knit polo shirt buttoned to the neck, khaki cargo pants, and a crucifix and a couple of other religious medallions around his neck. The first hints of a downy mustache were appearing on his upper lip, and he blinked frequently. He looked like a Hellenic Harry Potter. He sat quietly next to me, picking uninterestedly at his salad, which he eventually offered to me, saying, "I'm really not crazy about salad."

After exchanging a few pleasantries, the two families mostly kept to themselves. Unlike most other congregants at Assumption, this family doesn't know my in-laws particularly well. I felt like I should say something to the little boy--some kind of small talk--but I didn't. I'm fine with my own, but talking to other people's kids always makes me nervous. So we talked amongst ourselves and they amongst themselves, until I overheard the boy say something to his papou (grandfather) about, of all places, Hobbiton.

“Did you know there are actually forty-four families living in the Hobbiton village they built for the movie?” he asked excitedly. His papou, who looked to be about eighty and, like most elderly Greek immigrant men of my acquaintance, neither knew nor cared anything about The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings or the movies based on them. He just nodded indulgently.

But geek stuff like Tolkien is something I know a bit about, and his mention of Hobbiton provided a good conversational opening. We started chatting. Along the way, the little guy informed me that his name was Leftheri (short for Eleftherios), and that he was eleven years old.

His manner of speaking was, initially, marked by a certain kind of awkwardness, which I recognized immediately. It’s a variety commonly found in precocious boys in early adolescence. It's born of the competing desires to show an adult that they’re smart enough to be taken seriously, but not to sound too nerdy. It’s the awkwardness of someone who wants to impress favorably and not alienate. It’s the awkwardness of someone who wants to be liked. It worked, because I found myself liking him.

Having suffered painfully from that awkwardness during my own own early adolescence, I know how to set someone in that predicament at ease. I spoke to him like I would to an adult, listened intently, and nodded. Little by little, his woodenness and reserve melted away as he realized he was talking to someone who shared his enthusiasms--someone he didn't have to impress--and he grew more animated as we talked, his big religious medallions bouncing against his thin little chest, 

We talked hobbits for a while, and then moved on to the other area where we had some commonality, which was Greekness. I'm not Greek, but after fourteen years of marriage to one, having two half-Greek children, having been there four times, and being passably conversant in the language, I’m about as close to that culture as a xeno--a non-Greek--can be, so I felt like I was on pretty solid ground.

“So how’s your Greek?” I asked him, assuming that, like most of the young people at Assumption, he’d spoken it growing up.

“Not so good,” he said, surprising me. “I only started learning it after my mom died.”

When he said that, I realized that I knew who he was. I'd heard his story, which had been pretty big news on the St. Louis Greek gossip circuit.

As of about a year ago, his grandparents had no grandchildren. They had three children, but none of them had married, which caused them great sadness. Greeks, like all Mediterranean peoples, are deeply, almost smotheringly, family-oriented. Family ties, even across several generations, are suffocatingly strong—you’d better have a damn good reason if you miss a Sunday family dinner. God help you if you want to move to another city.

Being immigrants brought another, even more painful, dimension to having no grandchildren. Their family's eventual extinction would be an admission of defeat, a mockery of their wrenching dislocation from the old country for the sake of giving their family a better life in the new one, if, a generation hence, there wouldn't be a family to benefit from it. 

And then their son, who, like a lot of young Greek men, still lived at home with them, got a phone call.

It was from an old girlfriend, an American (as the Greeks refer to any white person who doesn’t belong to an identifiable ethnic group). After they’d broken up, she'd moved away from St. Louis, and he'd never heard from her again. She was dying of cancer, and was calling from her deathbed with a dying request.

He had a son. She'd never told him that he'd impregnated her before they broke up and she left town. And, as she had no family or friends to take the boy in after she died, she needed to find someone who could raise him. 

Naturally, the guy was astounded. He was also a little skeptical. Perhaps rightly so. I know nothing about Leftheri’s mother's character, but during the course of our conversation, he mentioned that he’d been moved around a lot when he was younger. That and her lack of any family or friends, any support system whatsoever, indicated to me a certain free-spiritedness (or instability) which may have merited a certain amount of skepticism on his part. 

But the DNA test he insisted upon left no room for doubt. The boy was his. And, with nowhere else to go, he came to live with his father's family in St. Louis.

I can't imagine what it was like for the boy. He'd had no idea who his father was. He didn’t know he was half Greek, or that his grandparents were immigrants. He may not have known any other Greek-Americans. They can can be a little overwhelming, and I suspect that the culture shock was significant. But his grandparents, unsurprisingly, were over the moon about it. They DID have a grandchild, after all. And, like all Greek parents, they know more about everything than you do, and decided to take over his upbringing.

Leftheri's embrace of his newfound Greekness was striking. His grandparents, naturally, had given him an Orthodox baptism and a Greek name, which he’d taken to using. I have no idea what his American name was, and I don’t suppose I need to, since he’d discarded it. He joined the youth Greek dance troupe in which my daughter also dances, enrolled in Greek school and began learning the language, and proudly wore his Greek bling on the outside of his shirt for all to see.

After they left, I got a little weepy at the table thinking about him. Drinking wine in the middle of the day might have had something to do with it. But I couldn’t help wondering what his nomadic little life had been like, before coming to St. Louis and meeting his father and his family, or why he'd been so eager to shed his original name for a Greek one. I couldn’t help feeling sad for a little boy who’d lost his mother and who hadn’t had a father for those crucial early formative years. And I couldn’t help but be happy that, having come through the greatest loss a child can experience, he’d found not merely a family, but an entire nationality to enfold him in its loud, close, boisterous arms--an ethnic identity to help a lost boy define himself.

Or maybe I just saw something of myself in a quiet, undersized, bookish kid with a penchant for losing himself in imaginary realms and who found a defining lodestar in an ancestral culture, as my grandmother's Jewishness had helped me carve out a path toward self-realization.  

Leftheri was luckier than most of the children in his situation—the casualties of life’s shuffles, the kids left bereft by the questionable life-choices of the people on whom they depend. He'd found a softer landing than most. But his story, this strange hybrid of Charles Dickens and Jeffrey Eugenides, still pierced me in a way that few other people’s have. And I'm concerned about him. His grandparents, as glad as they were to get him, aren't exactly spring chickens and won’t be around forever. I worry about that eventual loss coming on top of the horrific one he's already suffered. Something in me wants to adopt this little guy. I want to mentor him, to take him under my wing. He’s clearly on a fast track to geekdom, and he's going to need someone to help him navigate the process of melding geek and cool. Trust me, no one does that better than I do.

But mostly, I suppose, I just want him to be okay. 

A Lecture from a Dead Man: What Joseph Pulitzer Would Think of the American Press in 2013.

Because I’m one of about three people in the country who actually cares or knows anything about Joseph Pulitzer, the visionary genius who more or less singlehandedly created the modern American press—and because, irrepressible show-off that I am, a published a few articles about him—I’m occasionally asked to speak about him.

These aren’t big or important venues. Mostly they’re small retiree groups from churches and synagogues, groups of the kind of elderly people who read things like the Missouri Historical Society’s journal. But I’m always glad to do it. They’re nice people and they ask interesting questions, like the one I was asked at the most recent gathering: “What would Pulitzer have thought of the state of the media today?”

My immediate answer was, “Not much.” But a longer answer is probably in order. Joseph Pulitzer was one of the most demanding men who ever lived. He literally drove himself into an early grave, and expected no less of his employees, his papers, and his family. He was a martinet of the first water, constantly hectoring, badgering, cajoling, noodging, and demanding improvement—not perfection, but improvement—from everyone with whom he came into contact.

The American media is, in large part, his creation. Part of his genius was an almost uncanny sense of what would appeal to the reader—what would grab their interest and keep them coming back for more. He was probably the greatest huckster in our history, a carnival barker with the soul of a philosopher-king.

And although it sounds like a truism today, he genuinely wanted everyone to read the paper and came up with tricks and tips to reel the public in and keep them there. He realized that new labor laws were giving the working class at least one day off a week, so he created the Sunday Magazine—lighter and more interesting fare that people could read at their leisure. He stuck in games and puzzles and comics to snag the kids. He added sections on fashion and housekeeping to rope in women. Although he thought sports was a waste of time, he created the sports page because he knew people would read it.

Because ever-growing numbers of New Yorkers were recent immigrants, he made the paper easier to read. Simplified the style. Increased the font size and the headline size. And went crazy with the illustrations, which were so good and so evocative that you didn’t even have to be able to read to get the gist of the day’s news—you could get it from just looking at the pictures.

By creating a paper that cut across all lines—age, race, gender, class, creed, native born/immigrant, level of education, etc.—he created a truly People’s Paper which addressed issues of interest to all New Yorkers. And in doing so, he laid the foundations for the creation of a national media—one that all Americans would read, watch, or listen to, and which would serve as a sort of forum for the dissemination of information, and discussion of issues, of interest to all Americans.

So, considering it is, in many ways, his creation, the thought of what he’d say if he could see the current state of the American media is daunting.

In my self-appointed role as The Guy Who Thinks He Knows What Mr. Pulitzer Would Think, I’m confident when I say that, as regards the current state of the American news media, I don’t think he’s spinning in his grave. I think he’s doing triple axels in it. Frankly, I’m surprised he hasn’t drilled himself out of there by now, brushed off the grave-dust, and started haranguing at the top of his harsh, shrill voice. I think Joseph Pulitzer would be deeply disappointed in the American press for three major reasons.

~          ~          ~

First off, he’d be appalled at the extent to which the press is controlled by corporations. In 2013, 90% of the American media is controlled by six corporations: GE, Newscorp, Disney, Viacom, Time/Warner, and CBS. Think about that. Six executives control what 277 million Americans see, hear, and read. Do you think any of these six guys have any interest beyond financial in controlling what goes into your head?

This is what Pulitzer feared the most, and the thing against which he fought hardest—that the flow of information would be controlled by interests which have something to gain by controlling it. Pulitzer himself went to lengths that would be considered absurd today to keep both himself and his newspapers free of any kind of entanglements—personal, political, or financial—that could potentially have compromised his ability to report the news.

He was terrified of debt, for example. When he bought his papers, he paid cash—when he built his buildings, he did so with cash. After the New York World built its new building on Park Row in Manhattan—it was, for about five minutes, the tallest building in the country—the World’s headlines trumpeted, “Tallest Building In The World, And Not A Penny In Debt.” This wasn’t just boasting about the proprietor’s financial acumen (which was substantial)—it was reassuring his public that he hadn’t sold his soul to build a new building, and that no lender would have any leverage on him.  

Including leverage from himself. He once pulled an editor aside, and said, “Boy, as you know, I am a large owner of stocks. If ever I order you to write a story favoring one of those companies, or withdraw one that might damage one of those companies, you are to disregard that order and remind me of this conversation.” He never had to, of course... but I find it very telling that Pulitzer held his papers’ independence to be so sacrosanct that he didn’t trust even himself with its safekeeping.

Joseph Pulitzer was no socialist. He understood, probably better than anyone before or since, that a newspaper is, first and foremost, a business, and that before it can do anything else, it has to make a profit. And he understood that newspapers are bought and sold. He didn’t found either of his papers, he bought both of them. But I think it’s fair to say that he would have regarded the sale of a newspaper to a corporate interest, which is accountable only to its bottom line and shareholders and which has absolutely no interest in either reporting the news or protecting the public, as a rank betrayal of the public trust.

But that’s precisely what’s happened.

~          ~          ~

Secondly, he’d be shocked at the extent to which the media has allowed itself to become the willing patsy of the United States Government.

I don’t know whether it’s more reflective of the government’s increasing stranglehold over all aspects of our lives, or whether it’s laziness on the part of the press, but the government is now an absolutely integral part of the news process, which shouldn’t have happened.

Pulitzer conceived of the press as the independent Fourth Branch of government, the Oversight Branch. Supported entirely by its own revenue generation, whether through ad sales or subscriptions, the Press, protected by the First Amendment and the Power of Public Opinion, is there to hold the government in check—a responsibility it abdicated when it became reliant on the government for its information. This puts the press in an extremely precarious position. If you’re not in the government’s good graces, then you’re out in the cold, cut off from precious information, and scooped by your competition. Ask Helen Thomas. After the legendary AP reporter asked one too many awkward questions of the Bush Administration, she was banished from press briefings. A disgraceful act—she deserved better treatment than that, and it should have sent up red flags across the nation. An administration with nothing to hide doesn’t send reporters to Siberia. But too little noticed at the time.

I’m thinking specifically of the New York Times, which, in spite of its status as the Paper of Record, has, under the leadership of Arthur O. “Pinch” Sulzberger, has taken some very serious missteps. Take the Valerie Plame case, for example. When the Bush Administration, on orders from Dick Cheney, outed her as a spy because her husband, Joe Wilson, told the truth about Iraq, the Times, on information from a government informant, published the story--and then fell all over itself to protect its secret sources, even to the extent of letting the main reporter on the story, Judith Miller, sit in jail for a month for contempt of court, with Pinch crowing, “We will not reveal our sources! We must protect our friends within the government!”

Which is all very noble and heroic, but misguided. Because, as Mr. Pulitzer said, that “A newspaper should have no friends.”

Why it shouldn't ought to be obvious. When you become dependent upon the government for your information, you have, ipso facto, allowed the government to control the flow of information.

If you think that sounds like paranoia or conspiracy theory, think about this. In late August of 2002, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office “leaked” a story about weapons of mass destruction buildup in Iraq. Of course there was no leak. The story was placed there with Cheney’s full foreknowledge. It might even have been his idea. But the New York Times ran it on the front page on September 9, 2002, as some great expose, quoting “anonymous Administration officials.”

That very same day, Cheney himself appeared on “Meet The Press,” and said, “There's a story in the New York Times this morning... I don't want to talk about obviously specific intelligence sources, but it's now public that, in fact, he [Saddam] has been seeking to acquire... the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge and the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly-enriched uranium which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb."

In short, he cited a story that his office had placed there as justification for our government’s horrific actions in Iraq—a war crime far greater in scope and size than anything Saddam had ever done, or ever would do. 

Like him or loathe him, you have to admit that this was a masterstroke on Cheney’s part to achieve policy aims. And the Times looked like (hell, didn’t look like, was) a complete patsy.

This simply would not have happened on a Pulitzer paper, precisely because of Pulitzer’s dictum: “A newspaper should have no friends.” The government is not your friend, and no one in it can be expected to be. There may be leaks. There may be whistleblowers. And perhaps you can get some good information out of them from time to time... but when you are dependent upon the government for your information, then they control it.

~          ~          ~

Finally, Joseph Pulitzer would be disgusted by the press’s incessant whining that no one’s reading them.

This is true, actually. Newspaper circulation is at historic lows—it’s below pre-World War II numbers. In 2009, Bloomberg reported that the decline of daily average circulation for 395 papers nationwide had doubled in a six-month period—and the numbers have only continued to go down. Newspaper management and other industry apologists blame competition from television, the Internet, and general lack of interest in the news, but as a friend of mine who writes for the AP put it, “Newspapers sleepwalked through the 90’s.” Assuming that they’d always be there, as they always had, they ignored the trends and woke up, Rip Van Winkle-like, to find themselves irrelevant.

But one can almost hear Old Man Pulitzer’s throaty Eastern European gutturals screaming from beyond the grave, “Well, if no one’s reading you, then goddammit, find a way to make them. You want to talk competition? I got people to read the paper when they worked twelve hour days, six days a week!”

As a dedicated newspaper reader since the age of seven, a one-time aspiring journalist, editor of my high-school paper, staff writer on my college paper, a working writer, a freelance magazine writer, and a longtime observer of the industry, I can tell newspapers what the problem is and it’s not competition. It’s content.

Pick up the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—a battered, flickering shadow of a ghost of the magnificent paper that it used to be—and you’ll realize immediately why people don’t read the paper any more. It’s because there’s nothing there worth reading. It’s boring, more than 70% of the news on Section A comes from the wire, and the rest of it is bra ads. Which are, admittedly, fun to look at, but again, I can see better porn online. The rest of it is either ersatz or flat. Newspapers became irrelevant not because of competition from screens, but because of their own lassitude.

But newspapers reacted in a predictably stupid way to the plunge in revenue. They gutted staff--the very writers that actually write the stuff worth reading--and got rid of the elements that, back in the day, roped readers in in the first place. The comics page—the home and cradle of our greatest American art form—is a joke and a disgrace, still limping by on the same old “my wife, she’s such a bitch” yuks of Hagar the Horrible, the "Sarge, he's such a jackass" yuks of Beetle Bailey, and the three-frame antics of a fat cat. The great strips, like “Peanuts,” “Bloom County,” “Calvin and Hobbes,” and “The Far Side,” are gone—and with the comics page being ever shrunken and the future of newspapers themselves questionable, we will not see their like again. And many of them responded by raising prices to offset falling revenues--which, as any two-bit business major can tell you, is the last thing you should do.

Essentially, newspapers give us no reason to read them. Which is too bad, because we need them.

News on the ‘Net is bites and clips. You can absorb the headlines, but there’s no time and no space for the in-depth analysis that newspapers, as a medium, can provide. People simply don’t like to read the amount of material that good journalism requires online. It hurts the eyes. Online news isn’t journalism. It’s trivia. Online journalism and print journalism is the difference between multiple choice and an essay question.

And this is a tragedy, not merely for the newspaper industry, but for our democracy. A working democracy requires an informed and knowledgeable public. Pulitzer, who fled a repressive regime in Europe, knew this better than anyone. It’s why he worked so hard at what he did. He cherished liberty, and he knew that the price of it, as Jefferson had said, was eternal vigilance: a service that only the press can provide.

“Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together," the old man wrote. "An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”

Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. Look around and tell me Joseph Pulitzer wasn’t a prophet.