"Historic reforms pass House," shouts today's Chi Trib hard copy front page main headline, and the picture next to it is of Rep. Barney Frank, D.-Mass. (he who stood and watched while Fannie Mae went down the drain), who is quoted in a cutline (but not in the story) beneath his and Pelosi's and another guy's pic (in which neither P. nor other guy is identified): "If a company fails [unless it's Fannie Mae], it will be put to death," says B. Frank
The jump page head is "House passes major reforms for Wall Street."
Does all that sound like something good, or does it?
Meanwhile, the Trib web site, with its House passes largest expansion of financial regulations since Depression, is pleasantly less exuberant as to head, and for the same story trumpeted in hard copy as above.
I'd found myself irked by the writer, Jim Puzzanghera, but after reading the story and reminding myself that he doesn't do heads, I took back my irkedness, giving the working stiff in Wash. the benefit of a doubt. Seeing how the story progressed from yesterday's early filing, also on the web, as in House Passes Sweeping New Rules for Financial System, Tough Fight Ahead in Senate -- without the hot-damn, good-news element of hard-copy copy editors' excitement, ginned by news editors' misplaced eagerness, probably to please some ga-ga-for-"reform" managing or more highly placed editor, but I take back
Tough fight ahead in Senate is more like it, to be sure, not because the bill is bad, which it almost certainly is, but because reality demands perspective, and the Senate is really real in this situation.
But that hard-copy "historic reforms"? It's not in a class with announcing V-J Day or even Sox winning the pennant, but maybe with dreamed city budget coming up black in the wake of historic newly realized governmental efficiency at Streets and San? Calling it a reform is to beg the question, i.e. dodge it, and makes the paper look silly.
I had to turn over the front page on the dining room table, so as not to be distracted from important things such as reading and writing books.
Not to let working-stiff reporter off the hook entirely, with his bill that "would create a powerful agency to protect consumers . . . " Would presumably or even, I would use it reluctantly, allegedly protect them. He lost his distance there.
Later, it's House Dems saying it would reverse "lax oversight" under Bush, which I'm sure they are saying, and working stiff can't insert the Frank-Fannie Mae laxity here, but I the reader do insert it mentally. But I insert lots of things mentally as I read noosepapers, and anything else, for that matter. It's the hyperactivity of a mind overflowing with lots of unorganized, undigested stuff. It's why I write, to bring some order out of the chaos.
