The local newsrag shows up in my office every day, and once in a while some headline will catch my eye. Otherwise, I don't touch it--no time, and it really is such a travesty, it makes The New York Post look like The Federalist Papers. I respect the Post though, sort of, because (like the British mass-market press) it never pretends to journalistic excellence. It's fishwrap, it knows it, and it makes plenty of money for whoever owns it (wild guess: Rupert Murdoch). It's also in New York. City.
The fishwrap to which I refer here, however, is headquartered in Palm Springs, California, a resort community that got its start in the 1930s and 1940s when Hollywood was looking for a place to play, not too far outside its own back yard but far enough to elude the press (anyone who remembers "movie magazines"--Photoplay, for instance--raise a withered claw!) and the "moral turpitude" clauses in their studio contracts. It's always been a sandbox, has Palm Springs, a beautiful, warm, clean, sweet-smelling place where the locals live in chicken coops (however splendiferously designed and decked out), and nobody takes anything very seriously because it's too hot or the weather's just perfect for whatever you want to do--play golf, play tennis, hike, ride a horse, ride a person . . . whatever.
But lately, Palm Springs (and environs) has begun to take itself way too fucking seriously, as if it were an actual place and not just a figment of everybody's imagination. Apparently, a woman who lives here was a flight attendant 14 years ago (how many of us can say the same? hoist those withered claws again, please!) and in the course of exercising her offduty recreational options as such, got one thrown into her by some guy called Al, whose mother was a movie star and married a prince from somewhere in Yerup, so this guy Al is a prince, too. As a result of this impulsive behavior (on both sides), a child was born--surprise! Which makes the girl a princess, sort of. Or it would if her progenitor acknowledged her. Which at first he refused to do but now he did, just the other day, in the same week he acknowledged her half-sibling, who lives in Africa, apparently. (I may have some of the details wrong, here.)
Anyway, this poor kid with the Eurotrash old man she's never met lives in my neighborhood. The international press is all over her--or is trying to be, but is being fended off by (1) personnel at her local, unpretentious private school, and (2) local law enforcement (trespassing, etc.). News trucks parked in front of the school, lying in wait for a 14-year-old girl. And, as you see here http://www.thedesertsun.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060601/COLUMNS23/606010310 , paparazzi camped out under the trees across the street, interviewing each other while lying in wait for a 14-year-old girl.
The local "journalists" find the paparazzi exotic and fascinating. Need I say more? Need I use the word "pathetic"? No? I suspected as much. Thank you.
Oh, by the way, it's not like there's no news around here: we're expecting a race war any day now. The Mexicans want their country back, and I don't really blame them, but yikes, it's scary! And it's everywhere around here, would make great copy for a journalist who could (1) think and (2) write. Remember: you heard it here first!