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

interest in the city his newspaper was supposed to cover; his only passion was the business itself, a thing he called newspapering, and he constantly made us all uncomfortable by professing a creepy, nostalgic love for this made-up word, a love he seemed to mainly show by wearing a ’40s-movie fedora and getting weepy whenever he reflected back on the fourteen months he spent as a libelous reporter waterboarding the English language. “The man loves journalism the way pedophiles love children,” we used to say.
    Meanwhile, M—continued to promote his sycophants and to build himself the Taj Mahal of offices, even as he oversaw round after round of layoffs. Like some medieval doctor, this self-aggrandizing bully claimed he was saving the paper every time he bled it, and throughout the long decline, continued to waste a reporter’s full salary each year flying to journalism conferences where he could bloviate alongside the other Saddams about the future of newspapers (whose very death they were ensuring). We dreaded whenever M—went to one of these conferences because he invariably came home with a whole new batch of bad ideas , and like a delusional general moving his shrinking forces across fronts that only he could see, he would announce one day the future of newspapers was an entirely online edition. (Advertisers read this proclamation, shrugged and cancelled their ads in the print edition, leading to yet another round of layoffs.) Then, without ever acknowledging a misstep, M—would proclaim the future of newspapers was putting print reporters on television! (Anyone who has ever seen a newspaper reporter knows how this turned out…more layoffs.) Then the future was putting the newspaper on radio! (“Radio? My God, we’re going backwards in time,” my colleagues said. “What’s next? Cave-painting?”) In the waves of layoffs that accompanied these paroxysmal death-throes, this bearded shit-in-a-suit whacked the newspaper’s most profitable sections and bureaus and its best writers and shooters, all to protect his ring of beholden pets, a phalanx of talent-challenged ass-sniffers and the cadre of bulbous interns that he hired from his Midwest alma mater and its pretentiously named H—School of Journalism (there are two things that should never be named: j-schools and penises), an equally overrated institution that he hoped to eventually return to in some kind of endowed bean bag chair.
    But I suppose death comes for tyrants too. Because recently, I’ve heard from my former colleagues that M—is being forced out himself, that the publisher is finally tired of his blustery bristling incompetence, and has given him two months to find another job. Like any delusional dictator looking for asylum, M—is planning to make it look as if he’s fed up with years of laying people off and has decided to fall on his own sword (a weapon profoundly dulled from the heads he’s chopped with it). Then he can go out and seek ingratiating, flattering profiles of himself (One Editor Takes a Stand) in industry publications that should know better. Ah, well. Cheaper than sending out résumés, I suppose.
    And what of the ship that this Queeg of journalism has run aground? My old paper, which I still irrationally love, is half the number of pages it was just a few years ago and one rail narrower. The once plucky staff—my old colleagues and friends—now resembles the nervous crew in one of the Alien movies, their numbers shrinking as they look over their shoulders and wait for one of those mean little pink-slips to burst out of their chests.
    So there’s that.
    On the elevator, M—stares straight ahead. Like any bully, I know that he is driven by his own insecurities, and for a minute I have some sympathy for this awkward, friendless stump, who somehow believes that chinstraps aren’t just for boy bands, and who is, after all, on his way to being out of work himself. But none of that excuses his behavior; only bullies respond