Free The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter Page A

was “lucky” to get so much severance because they could have only counted my service from the four months after I returned.
    “Lucky,” I said.
    Now, as I take the elevator up to the fifth floor and that Gitmo of offices, Human Resources, I pray to God or the Pope, or whichever saint is in charge of humiliation avoidance that the elevator doors will NOT open to the third floor, that old cauldron of a newsroom, but of course the Pope—knowing that I haven’t taken the required classes yet—causes the doors to open exactly on the third floor. And, not satisfied with this, the Pope causes to step on my elevator the last person on earth I would want to see, the Idi Amin of journalism, the Pol Pot of my newspaper, he whose name cannot be typed without befouling a keyboard, the very editor who accepted my resignation two years ago and then took me back, only to force me out four months later, the evil M—. With him is one of the young women he likes to hire, unfailingly busty reporters he is tireless in his willingness to…uh, mentor.
    “Oh,” says M—as he steps onto the elevator. His back stiffens. He looks like he’s seen a ghost, the ghost of someone he whacked. “Matt. Hello. How are you?”
    “Excellent,” I answer. “Much happier, thanks. Taller.”
    We ride in silence. M—is an awkward clunk of a man who constantly strokes his pencil-thin chinstrap beard, which due to his substantial girth, is more like a double-chin strap. I suppose it’s unfair, blaming this bloated despot for ruining my newspaper, since every paper is similarly suffering, the big-picture decline of my newspaper no different than the decline of newspapers in most towns. Specifically, the timeline looks like this:
    1950s: TV arrives and it turns out that most people prefer having their news delivered by a guy on TV with molded plastic hair, smoking a cigarette.
     
    1960s: Evolution and improved diet cause the first father in history to give up reading the paper on the toilet…much like the first fish that walked on land.
     
    1970s: Literacy and newspapers reach their peak just as, ironically, actual reading begins to decline. (Side note: the guy reading the TV news quits smoking on air.)
     
    1980s: Cable TV arrives and steals ad dollars from newspapers; soon entire channels are devoted to 24 hours-a-day news with three main components: (1) stories about celebrities, (2) police chases filmed from helicopters and (3) angry political hacks yelling at one another.
     
    1990s: The Internet arrives, stealing even more advertising, and compelling the last reader under forty to cancel his daily newspaper subscription so he can devote more time to masturbating to online porn.
     
    2000s: eBay and craigslist combine to kill off classified advertising and car and house listings, which turn out to have been the financial backbone of newspapers. The recession crushes display advertisers, coolly finishing the job.
     
    Present: After a long period of newspaper panic, publishers do increasingly stupid things to drive away what readers they once had, speeding up their impending death, which is now estimated to be somewhere around 2015.
     
    Of course, the specific details vary. At my mid-sized newspaper, the soul-disabled publisher scoured the various newspaper chains until he found the perfect budget-hacking delusional jargon-monkey, a man driven out of every crappy newspaper he ever ruined, a man who—in my humble opinion—is at the very least a narcissist, and at worst, a complete sociopath (thus, his in-house nickname, Idi Amin). Like any tyrant worth his sadism, M—’s first move was to force out any managers who might disagree with him, and his second move—right out of the Khmer Rouge playbook—was to target and demote any intelligent people left who might question his propaganda, until before long, he had systematically dumbed down management to a flock of morons whose only qualification was loyalty. Oddly, M—seemed to have no real