Civil Commotion

Apparently, The Donald was seriously displeased by the oatmeal this morning.

The sight of morons howling and bellowing “CNN Sucks!” made Eric Trump proud, and when the Moron-in-Chief saw Eric’s tweet he felt proud, too.

These ignoramuses are proud of stoking mob rage at journalists. Think about that.

The New York Times has an engaging piece about the decline of religion in Quebec, and the repurposing of defunct churches.

The radical makeovers of Quebec churches reflect the drastic decline of the Catholic Church in a majority-Catholic Canadian province, where 95 percent of the population went to Mass in the 1950s but only 5 percent do so today.

The sharp drop in church attendance, coupled with spiraling maintenance costs, has made heritage groups, architects and the church itself think creatively to conserve historic buildings at risk of being shuttered or demolished.

As of April, 547 churches in Quebec had been closed, sold or transformed, according to the Québec Religious Heritage Council.

Little theater, comedy clubs, community centers, boutiques … all better uses than striving to convince people that they’re no damn good. Can’t happen fast enough, so far as I’m concerned.

Reasoning that today’s tweet by The Donald about their meeting puts their off-the-record meeting into the record, Sulzberger has issued the following statement:

Statement of A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher, The New York Times:

My main purpose for accepting the meeting was to raise concerns about the president’s deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric.

I told the president directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous.

I told him that although the phrase “fake news” is untrue and harmful, I am far more concerned about his labeling journalists “the enemy of the people.” I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.

I repeatedly stressed that this is particularly true abroad, where the president’s rhetoric is being used by some regimes to justify sweeping crackdowns on journalists. I warned that it was putting lives at risk, that it was undermining the democratic ideals of our nation, and that it was eroding one of our country’s greatest exports: a commitment to free speech and a free press.

Throughout the conversation I emphasized that if President Trump, like previous presidents, was upset with coverage of his administration he was of course free to tell the world. I made clear repeatedly that I was not asking for him to soften his attacks on The Times if he felt our coverage was unfair. Instead, I implored him to reconsider his broader attacks on journalism, which I believe are dangerous and harmful to our country.

I think increasingly that violence against journalists is inevitable. After all, journalism is doing heroic work exposing Trump’s lies — and a scammer can’t risk truth. As he did before the VFW just a few days ago, he will continue to abuse the journalists who are covering him — and one or more will get badly hurt one of these times; probably, before the November election.

I can’t help taking this personally. As longtime readers know, I have a nephew who is a journalist. I have written on the order of one-hundred reported magazine features through the years (though I don’t call myself a journalist, but an engineer), and once worked as a magazine editor. I have known and worked with a great many journalists through the years, including some Pulitzer-nominees; they are among the hardest-working, best informed, most scrupulous people I know, and all exhibit high ethical standards.

The press won’t buckle before a plaid-suited carnival barker like The Donald, and I’m just hoping that not too many get hurt before the nightmare of Trump’s authoritarian ambitions comes to its deserved end.

I hope Sulzberger publishes an account of the meeting.

Trump seems not to understand that journalism is intensely competitive, that Newspaper A loves to catch Newpaper B or Network C in an error. When the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN are all publishing identical accounts it’s not ‘fake news,’ it’s simply something The Donald doesn’t want the public to know. And, of course, Trump’s pejorative ‘fake news’ has morphed into ‘enemy of the people’ only in the arid vacuity of his and the Deplorable One-third’s dysfunctional minds.