Control.
That’s what I wanted.
Before we left for vacation on August 1, I wrote enough columns to post a new one each day that I was gone.
Well, almost.
True, I recycled one.
Hey, Bob Talbert did that.
Remember Bob Talbert, the late Free Press columnist?
As it turned out, I was short by one column on the day we returned.
Darn.
That return happened to be at 1 a.m. on Sunday, August 10.
What a long, tiring trip back from Canada.
But already, I knew my sense of control was limited exclusively to my web column.
Saturday afternoon, while we’d stopped in Sault Ste. Marie on our way home from McGregor Bay in Ontario, my cell phone rang.
This by itself was a startling experience. There was no Verizon service in the Bay, nor was there Internet. At least not for us.
No phone calls. No email.
Peace and quiet.
For me, the week was a complete news blackout.
The call in the Soo was from Abe, my younger son. Somewhere around Alma, he’d seen a Lansing newspaper.
Kwame was in jail! he said.
Kwame in jail?
Wait a minute! When we left the States, he was facing a preliminary exam in September. Trial sometime next year on perjury and other charges. He hasn’t been convicted of anything. So far.
Kwame in jail?
How’d that happen?
Next day, I traipsed out to the mailbox and brought back The Detroit Free Press and The New York Times. You wouldn’t know it from the Free Press front page, but according to the Times, Russia was — is — making war on Georgia.
What’s going on?
I leave home for a week and all hell breaks loose.
I’m not sure what to make of the latest Kwame doings. Is he being hectored by prosecutorial sharks smelling Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s blood in the pool?
Or is he numbly sleepwalking his last days in office, bumbling from one stupid confrontation to another?
One thing is clear: The pressure for Kwame to abdicate is really intense. Amazing what a night in jail will do for his image.
Pressure. Yes, it’s really on. Don’t believe me? Check the August 9 Free Press: “PRESSURE’S ON,” the almost 2-inch capital letters scream. “NEW CHARGES, OUTCRY TURN UP HEAT.”
Much of that heat is being stoked by the Free Press itself, hot on the trail of its first reportorial Pulitzer since 1967.
That much hasn’t changed.
Well, let me read some more papers, do some errands and mull over all the new news.
Something tells me it’s not so new, just part of an old pattern playing out.
I’ll be back when I’ve figured it out.
No, just kidding. If I waited too figure it all out, I’d never post again.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
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