A Requiem for Sober Analysis
By Montgomery “Monty” Blackwood
Dear Terry,
May I call you Terry? I’m going to call you Terry. We’re both men who have spent an unhealthy amount of time observing the machinery of power, and that, I feel, should afford us a certain weary informality.
I am the editor of a small, disreputable newspaper called The Post Meridiem Post. I am writing to you today from my desk in Why, Arizona, to offer you a job.
Now, before you discard this as the rambling of a madman (a fair, if hasty, assessment), I ask that you hear me out. I have followed your career for years. I have seen your clear-eyed dispatches from the Supreme Court, a place of profound and baffling contradictions. I’ve watched you navigate the hallowed halls of the White House and the polished sets of ABC News with the determined air of a man searching for a reasonable adult in a room full of screaming toddlers.
You, sir, are a practitioner of a noble and dying art: the sober, fact-based analysis of public affairs. And I am here to tell you that your art form is dead.
The world no longer responds to sober analysis. Reality has become too absurd, too self-satirizing, to be reported on with a straight face. To attempt to do so is to become part of the joke. To stand on the White House lawn and report on a new policy with earnest gravity is to be the lone man in a tuxedo trying to conduct a string quartet in the middle of a monster truck rally.
That is why I am writing to you. You have spent a career speaking truth to power. I am offering you the chance to do something far more honest: to hold up a cracked, funhouse mirror to it.
Here at The Post Meridiem Post, we have abandoned the pretense of “objective reality.” Our gossip columnist interviews furniture. Our tech editor believes Wi-Fi is a form of witchcraft. Our lead political correspondent is more concerned with the grammatical failings of a protest sign than with its message. It is, by all accounts, a circus. But I have come to believe it is the only honest circus in town.
We do not offer a competitive salary, our healthcare plan is based on the advice of a man who communicates with squirrels, and our Art Department is a seven-year-old. What we offer is a platform to finally report on the world as it truly is: a baffling, hilarious, and deeply troubling farce.
You’ve covered the highest court in the land. You’ve seen how the sausage is made. Now come and join us where the sausage is not only made, but where it is openly acknowledged to be made of raccoons and sawdust. It is, I believe, the final, most honest beat for a journalist of your stature.
The whiskey is on me. We hope to hear from you.
Yours in weary admiration,
Montgomery “Monty” Blackwood
Editor-in-Chief
The Post Meridiem Post
