It Was Fun But All Good Things Come To An End

When I woke up to discover that Donald Trump was the president elect of the United States I felt betrayed by The New York Times.  I have been a faithful reader, nay a compulsive reader for more than four decades.  It's all the news that's fit to print, so surely their staff must have a handle on what's going on.  The betrayal struck deep; I decided I could no longer believe a word that they printed.  And so I went to my computer and cancelled my subscription for home delivery.  The operator with whom I spoke was gently insistent that I not do this, a little surprising I thought, since she could hardly have been personally affected by my decision.  Still and all, I have since learned that the Times was genuinely concerned to reach out to their readership to insist that this failure of reportage on their part would not happen again.  I changed my subscription to the Guardian and in the first issue sent out to me there was a revealing article by a reporter who had embedded himself with the Sanders and Trump campaigns, and thus had been very much aware that the great unwashed of the United State whom neither Secretary Clinton nor The New York Times seemed to bother to investigate were firmly committed to Mr. Trump.  Actually I had grown weary of the Times for some time as their other sections Style, Food, etc.  seemed to me to grow more and more irrelevant to my world, which is that of an aging retired academic on a pension from TIAA-CREF.  They were too much Vogue Magazine, it seemed to me.  The advertisements for real estate in the Sunday magazine, I mean stupendous condos that were beyond my imagining--think Russian or Chinese tycoons--began to offend me.  The clothes they profiled in Style were obviously not for an aging, eighty plus year old male with a sagging midline (what does that mean?), but more to the point whoever is normal pays hundreds of dollars for a sweater? Even thousands, for God's sake?  Well, some choice readers of the Times that's who.  So sayonara, Times.  And, you know, maybe it's just me, not you.  Really too far out of it, too slow of a pace, not up to the Times anymore.