All The News That's Fit To Print

As an assiduous, nay compulsive reader of The New York Times for the past four or five decades, I was amazed to turn to the Arts section this morning and discover that I did not know about any of the persons mentioned in its three or four pages.  I have long realized that various activities and personages were slipping beyond my grasp--I never quite managed even a tiny interest in rap music or the performers of it--but there it is, from Boyancé to oh, you name it, anyone of the people cited today, names and personalities and physical appearance.  These are the people who are in dialogue with the American public for better or for worse, and the clear implication is that I am out of the conversation.  And, indeed, if I stop to examine my situation I am very much on the sidelines, signaled as nothing else quite can, by the fact that I do not watch news or commentary programs on television, thus definitely am not sitting at the breakfast table or in the parlor with my fellow Americans.  I remember well enough talking to my grandmother when we visited my aunt in Oak Park who housed her mother in her declining years.  Declining?  At the time I doubt that she was as old as  I am right now.  But she seemed exceedingly remote in time, if only by virtue of her faint voice, the words all pronounced in a Beacon Hill Boston accent (I have to mention Beacon Hill; I would die if anyone imagined she spoke like a Southie.) which made her almost foreign to me.  She came down to take dinner with the entire family, and sipped sherry beforehand during the cocktail hour.  The conversation went back and forth, and I could see that although Grammy Beye was an exceedingly alert woman, she really did not care to enter into anything because she did not care that much--the rest of the group almost shouting as they went back and forth over the behavior and ideas of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  That's sort of like me.  I confess to never having seen or heard either Secretary Clinton or Donald Trump speak on television, although one day I was somewhere perhaps in a store and busy with something and while waiting for the service whatever it was that I required caught a glimpse of Clinton on a television screen across the large room I was in.  Nothing however prompted me to draw close and investigate.  Somehow events have eluded me.