The Daily News

For years I was subscribed to a daily newspaper but stopped reading it when I realized that I was only interested in the comics. I have never been a watcher of the evening television news. At some point I figured out that I didn’t care about most of what happens every day in the world. With the possible obvious exception of natural disasters with wow visuals that only television can show properly, I don’t believe that most of what happens matters. I prefer to wait and read what a weekly newsmagazine, with more in depth analyses, has to say about domestic and world events. My reasoning is that a week’s time is enough to filter out the trivial and that what makes it through the filter may truly matter to me.

But this morning, while waiting in a car dealership’s service lounge to discover what was the awful stink coming out of my car’s heater, I looked through the Ottawa Citizen. The Ottawa Citizen is a respectable newspaper with business news and a large weekend real estate section that’s thick enough to use as kindling in our fireplace; it’s no gossip tabloid with pictures of babes and stereo ads.

There was a story about some goings on in Harare, ruled by Robert Mugabe, someone that is generally acknowledged to have despotic tendencies. About a year ago an old spiritual healer woman claimed that she could extract diesel oil from a stone by hitting it with her cane. Believing that their country’s energy problems were over, the government gifted her with a few million dollars and one of those farms that the Mugabe government had reclaimed from white colonial farmers. Then one day not long ago, they decided that the jig was up and she’s now in jail for defrauding the government.

I don’t know what’s more amazing about the story, her ability to keep the con game going for a year, or officialdom’s inability to discover it sooner. Did some lowly functionary from an obscure department stop off at the rock to top up his tank, and then fire off a memo or email that someone actually read?

Some conspiracy theorists maintain that the world’s media is just a vast playing field for dark forces that are attempting to keep us all at bay and happy at work by numbing us with pablum. Maybe it’s true. Maybe, if we didn’t have a story like this now and then to give us a good belly laugh, we might load the shotgun and blow the head off that twerp next door who can’t figure out how to keep his garbage can’s lid on properly, letting his refuse spill all over the driveway yet again. I mean, how often do you have to be told something that obvious before forfitting your right to keep breathing? Maybe if we took the time to think about our lives, we might not want to drone ourselves into a stupor for forty years at some desk or press punch machine. Maybe, to keep the wheels moving, we need to have our minds numbed.

Can you imagine what it must feel like for the people in that country, who have suffered unimaginable misery for decades at the hands of one whack job after another, to perhaps one day find themselves at a polling booth, watched over by UN inspectors, able to enjoy democracy at its most basic, can you imagine what it might feel like for them to read over the list of candidates on that polling card and see the names of jackasses who think that diesel oil comes out of rocks? I don’t know how to express such despair. I picture the poor voters turning the card over to see if there are any other names on the back, and not finding any. They’d be better off letting that old woman run the country with her magic cane.

So that’s why I don’t read the daily papers nor do I watch the evening news. That crap can’t possibly be real. It’s got to be a joke. Nothing else makes sense.

By the way, the stink from my car’s heater turned out to be dried leaves and twigs being charred by the heater fan motor. I was probably minutes away from having a campfire under my hood.