Pulled from reality

An analogy occurred to me and I tried it out on social media.

Let’s say Donald Trump had run for president wearing a ball cap that proclaimed, “Make American newspapers great again.”

Let’s say he’d vowed if elected to restore jobs to newspaper newsrooms. Let’s say his hamfisted opponent had gone to a journalists’ convention and said, “Those jobs are going, son, and they ain’t comin’ back.”

Let’s say Trump had won narrowly by an electoral-distribution fluke based on a few thousand votes. And let’s say exit polls showed that the decisive votes were cast for him by displaced newspaper employees—unreconstructed copy editors and beat reporters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Let’s say that Trump, not six months into his presidency, announced to great anticipation that, to keep his promise to make American newspapers great again and restore jobs within them, he was pulling the United States off the Internet.

We’d live in our own happy inky insular world. We’d bury our heads in informative broadsheets of newsprint each morning. But we’d miss a lot, by which I mean … you know, Google searches, Facebook, the outside world.

Trump didn’t pull our country off the worldwide

Web Thursday. But he did much the same thing for something and somebody else—dying Midwestern industries reliant on carbon emissions and the people who had long worked for them until the world began to change.

He pulled them—and effectively all Americans—out of the world’s climate reality.

He arbitrarily and unilaterally removed the United States from the Paris Accord on climate change. That made three nations not participating—Nicaragua, Syria and Trumpville, also known as 1950s revisited.

That this buffoonish creature named Donald Trump singularly spoke for the greatest nation on earth on the ultimate issue of the earth’s long-term sustainability … it’s as undemocratic as it is ironic and as ironic as it is a matter of twilight-zone horror.

What, then, of my analogy? What I got back from its posting on social media was that it was clever, maybe, but not entirely applicable.

For one thing, a reader responded that the printed word, even now, remains more inevitably important than the digital word. The printed word lives forever. The digital word can be erased and restyled time and again.

After all, I was using social media to try out analogies for the more important thing, meaning the lingering printed word.

But smokestack jobs in America are not more important than the future of the planet.

Climate change is as real as the Internet. For heaven’s sake, it’s more real. It’s the climate, after all.

No one contends very seriously otherwise. Arguments against climate change are almost always matters of economic fear and self-preservation, not learning or authority or science.

I know a man who denied climate change when he worked for a coal-firing electric utility and then breathed in relief and acknowledged it after he retired.

I didn’t blame him. Sometimes you must be about your paycheck and leave it to the rest of the world to use its broader and more objective perspective to deal with things that are real.

One man’s or one group’s economic fear cannot stop the world from spinning ’round ever more warmly.

In the end, here was the main benefit of my analogy: What I got back over social media fortified my ink-stained, newsprint-wrapped soul.

One man, for example, replied: “Can I take this analogy to imply that you have a soft view of the Internet? I’ve been barking up that tree with my grandfather for decades now. It has not worked, and things keep happening that prove his orientation to print-dominance correct. Seems the problem is that the Internet has become a giant ‘letters to the editor’ section, sans any filters. There’s good, even great, journalism online. You just have to wade through a sea of crap to find it.”

The best journalism I’ve found on the Internet lately occurs when, late on the preceding afternoon, the Washington Post or New York Times posts its next morning’s print scoop about the latest Trump outrage.

The best reason to watch cable allnews channels is to find out which newspaper scoop they’re reading.

Another man replied: “If nothing else, Trump has demonstrated why print journalism matters.”

Today’s conclusion, thus, is that Trump would have been better off pulling America off the Internet than out of the world.

It would have stopped him from tweeting, for one thing.

But without emails to hack, the Russians couldn’t get him re-elected.