The Sun-Times: Less Like the National Enquirer Every Day

The Sun-Times has toned down its girlie mag appearance and, by and large, reflects the city in a grown-up way. With one exception. I don’t know where they found Debra Pickett the proprietor of the so-called smart girl book club who writes All About Me in a school-girlish style and whose face smirks at you embodying the supposed “with it” that illuminati think they possess. Her deepest reflection was this: She wonders why her new husband doesn’t use Crest. They must have found her where they did the theological deep thinker Falsani or their sex therapist. About Pickett, I have rarely read such commonplace pandering to the famous as I have with her as she relates her lunches where the subject is caressed with flattery and frankincense. It doesn’t matter if it’s an athlete or actor, she fawns at them and licks their hands. Well, tell me I needn’t read it—and you’re right and I resolved to stop.

Then she writes about how U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is—get this—“hot.” What air is contained in a head that oozes this junk into a computer? For that tripe she should be sent to cover the county morgue in penance. There she could write about the dead whom she cannot hurt, covering all her subjects with one common level of ignominy. I have heard that she never took journalism: wonderful, it spares what is left of that profession from insult. If she had, it would have been a shame: trying to teach persons who cannot think to write which would be a dreadful waste of time. When I taught I knew of no one who started from a higher level of aspiration than a would-be journalist, someone who in the first phase would be genuinely romantic. If this is what the trade produces, the chronicler of frauds and charlatans with utterly no perspective to record banal jocosities, it is better that newspapers die. Fortunately, the Sun-Times is more than this but too often it presents such vacuous stuff as produced by Pickett that one cannot describe what she writes as fallacy. There: I have said it and resolve to read her no more even if she describes George W. Bush as “hot.”