The long and winding road, described by such notables as Will Rogers and W. C. Fields as being a tough row to hoe, continues to disintegrate with surprising rapidity for Pinch Sulzberger.
There are no kicks on Pinch's route 66 anymore, only kidney punches, short stock calls and PR bundled in black crepe.
Most recently, after all the other myriad fiascos, screw ups and collapses which mark the past few months, those filthy nasty no good private investors controlling a quarter of the paper's worth, who ought to understand the importance of maintaining the family lineage at the Times and to quit squawking about it and go on about their own nasty business, decided not to vote at all for four of the thirteen directors on the board, making everybody look totally shabby and adding to the hazy whirlpool of bad PR swirling around the Gray Lady.
Of course, there are the astronomical bills at the new office building, which keeps ballooning in cost. Pinch wishes that his building, with the bathrooms he designed, would just get finished without all the hoopla, the raised eyebrows and the questions from the stock holders. Come to think of it, almost all of his problems are a result of those stinking nitpicking stock holders.
Then, to add kerosene to the conflagration growing around the longtime liberal prolocutor, in his own paper's defense of his growing troubles with the stock holders, the hapless scrivener selected to elucidate the liberal cognoscenti who read the paper with his side of the blooming story and to protect his family's relatively unblemished name and long heralded reputation, well, flubbed up his whole entire cognomen, somehow dreaming up the outlandish Ochs-Sulzburger. and his paper printed it!
The old man would turn in his grave and have somebody's head for this foul up, which you'd swear was an inside job directed by the agents of ann Coulter or Gordon Liddy--maybe both. But you can't do that today with the all the trial lawyers, hurt feelings and threats of torts.
Of course nobody in the whole troublesome mess, from top to bottom, including the high paid boobs on the editorial staff and the idiots on their staffs, who are supposed to occasionally read the final copy, especially when Pinch figures in the story, noticed the long string of gaffes and they went out to print, misspellings and all.
The walls are really beginning to close in on the Pinchster.
Headaches are troubling enough, without the added problems of the pseudo-gout in the toes, the joint pain, the jangled nerves and the jumpiness whenever the phone rings from the corporate counsel. In fact every phone sounds like its ringing for Pinch now, even the one the dog walker carries.
Pinch has deleted all cooking shows from his TiVo and cancelled their season passes. Terms like fricassee, slow boil, burger, roast, melt, crisp, mashed, render, broast, and fry are just too disheartening to listen to lately.
The Eukanuba dog shows are off the TiVo as well--Pinscher is too close to the whispered nicknames he hears at the gas station, around the pharmacy, down at the club, over town and in the chophouses.
David Gregory keeps calling with advice about how much good the geist doctors did for all the White House press corps types who hit the skids and bottomed out on the roads around D.C., on account of Bush's dreadful behavior and how hard it is for them to keep humiliating the guy up front week after week, knowing that they have virtually no influence on world events.
But Pinch just can't slink off to a shrink every time the stock drops by half-- he'd be there twice a month and the staffs would talk and that would leak out to somebody from the right and reach the talk show circuits and the stock would drop again and the private investors would, well, you can just see the troubles it would cause. Say, isn't that exactly how often the Gregster said he should go?
So the New York Times stumbles along, losing readership, watching its stock disappear in value, misspelling the name of its chairman and publisher in its own articles, unable to seat a full complement of directors, fighting a civil war with its largest private investors, under continuing attack for its outrageously fictive writing, building the Hanging Gardens of Babylon for offices, displaying an all too clear liberal bias, fighting a rear guard action with Moodys over its long term debt and winning a valuable Pulitzer Prize for exposing information vital to the enemies of the United States in a time of war--at least they're doing one thing right.
Pinch has a lot to be proud of in the way he has handled the legacy bequeathed him by his father, Punch sans Judy.
Please help him, he's falling, throw a mattress on the sidewalk.
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