On Tuesday, our new president did offer one subtle whiff of the Great Depression. His injunction that “we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off” was a paraphrase of the great songwriter Dorothy Fields, who wrote that lyric for “Swing Time” (1936), arguably the best of the escapist musicals Hollywood churned out to lift the nation’s spirits in hard times. But Obama yoked that light-hearted evocation of Astaire and Rogers to a call for sacrifice that was deliberately somber, not radiantly Kennedyesque.
But it's admittedly a different kettle of fish and (b), I'm not taking responsibility for anything Frank Rich writes. And having finally bothered to importune Mister Google about it, I see that of course I wasn't really the first to note the Obama-Astaire resemblances: so far as I can tell this guy was, and with better pictures too. (2) A well-connected source, we'll just call him Gerald the Mole, points out that my snark at the Sunday Times' rather introverted circulation policy is misplaced. For their Canadian circulation efforts are entirely outsourced to... take a guess... the Globe and Mail! Which simply buys up some quota of papers and uses them to sweeten its own circulation efforts. Such as they are.
Gerald also confirms my worst fears, much less elegantly stated in Sunday's other post:
On another more urgent matter, you should know that a guiding principle of journalism is that "news" is something that editors have heard over and over and over.Yes, that would be the problem in a nutshell.
UPDATE: Apparently 'outsourced' is an overstatement: it's just that these Sunday-only Canadian subscriptions to the NYT are part of a Globe campaign and my snark is more properly directed at them. (Though I suppose for them it may make business sense to use the Times as short-term bait.)
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